[soulofmischief]

Agreed. One aspect of CA which interests me is robustness, the ability of a system to recover from error states.

What's been done with GoL is fascinating, but I think the next emergent layer of fascination for me is universal constructors which can handle a certain level of constant distributed noise or interference. A lot of times people just shrug and say, "well this pattern will always be critical/vulnerable in these locations, and cannot be made robust. But to me that opens up the door for entire classes of patterns which measure, embed and repair state of surrounding entities.