Designing Beauty ― The Art of Cellular Automata

This fascinating, colourful book is devoted to the beauty of cellular automata, which are arrays of simple machines with complex behavior.

In this book mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and engineers brought together marvellous and esoteric patterns generated by cellular automata.

The patterns in this book were generated by totalistic, cyclic and reversible automata, majority vote rules, asynchronous and excitable automata evolving on many-dimensional lattices, Penrose tilings, geodesic grids and hyperbolic planes. Computational potential of cellular automata is illustrated by snapshots of evolving counters, firing squad synchronisation and Prisoner's dilemma problems, self-reproduction. Configurations produced by cellular automata uncover mechanics of dynamic patterns formation, their propagation and interaction in natural systems: heart pacemaker, bacterial membrane proteins, chemical rectors, water permeation in soil, compressed gas, cell division, population dynamics, reaction-diffusion media and self-organisation. The book inspires artists to take on cellular automata as a tool of creativity and it persuades scientists to convert their research results into the works of art.

Andrew Adamatzky is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Director of the Unconventional Computing Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. He does research in reaction-diffusion computing, cellular automata, massive parallel computation, collective intelligence, bionics, complexity, non-linear science, novel hardware.

Genaro J Martinez is a professor at the School of Computer Sciences, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City, Mexico and visiting fellow at the Unconventional Computing Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. His does research in cellular automata, unconventional computing, artificial life, complex systems, and swarm robotics.