I'm not an expert but as far as I can see the overlap is "only" that they both use a grid to propagate values through. Which admittedly is a pretty fundamental way to structure things. The high-level concepts seem quite different otherwise.
I suspect you could encode (some) flow fields in neural cellular automata though. "Some" because "flow fields" aren't too strictly defined I'd say, so some of the more creative variations might not quite fit within the constraints of neural cellular automata.
So I guess it depends on the angle from which you approach it. Probably not from the "default" angles that most people use for either topic. OTOH finding an unexpected connection by looking at both in a non-obvious way might be fruitful though!
I suspect you could encode (some) flow fields in neural cellular automata though. "Some" because "flow fields" aren't too strictly defined I'd say, so some of the more creative variations might not quite fit within the constraints of neural cellular automata.
So I guess it depends on the angle from which you approach it. Probably not from the "default" angles that most people use for either topic. OTOH finding an unexpected connection by looking at both in a non-obvious way might be fruitful though!