Cellular Automation

 

Gosper's Glider Gun making "gliders" in Conway's Game of Life

A cellular automaton (plural form cellular automata, also abbreviated CA)
A discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. 

Computational modeling utilized to optimize aerodynamic surfaces in aircraft an automobile by engineers making use of CFD of computational fluid dynamics software with enhanced AI modeling & analysis.

CAE or computer aided engineering made it possible to industrialized society by enabling businesses and entire economies to operate on higher complexity levels with vastly more employees, such that software tools enable many people to collaborate in novels ways across vastly distant locals worldwide, and across time since information technology builds on previous discoveries in iterative ongoing ways that are revisionary in nature similar to science itself. 

I am talking about turbulence reducing curved up wing tips for passenger aircraft, or aero kits applied to class 8 trucks moving shipping containers that reduce drag so as to improve fuel economy and reduce tailpipe emissions. This means that aerodynamic tuning of a vehicle lowers its ongoing operating costs, making companies that operate vehicles tuned for drag reduction more profitable. 

Today with 4IR a surgeon in America can operate a digital surgical console to help perform an actual robotic surgery over high-speed internet many thousands of miles away in real time. This way highly skilled experts can travel digitally, without visiting these locations. This saves time and money while reducing pollution. Robotic surgery can also be done remotely with collaboration synergy such that multiple surgeons in different locations can all work together at the same time on a patient somewhere else. 

To understand how cells in life self-assemble from chemicals into living beings, many theories have been developed about cell replication, bioinformatics, epigenetic, genetic, DNA transcription into RNA or encoded amino acid products that make up the cell components, organelles, membranes and all other parts of biological living cell systems in plants, animals, fungi and bacteria.

Simulations on computers are cost effective ways to try out new ideas without the cost or expense of making many different real-world examples to test like they did with ship propellers back when the Titanic was being designed. Simulating a ship prop in a computer server software defined environment can be hundreds or thousands of times less expensive than making many different props to test in the real world. This is why technology was so costly and time consuming in the past. To try anything, the idea had to be made into physical objects for testing, then the results collected, analyzed and shared, which means slow social diffusion in books and snail mail back then. Change in society was slow and many aspects of applied technology changed very little within a human lifetime. 

Microstructure modeling has many applications as the physical surfaces of performance objects strongly affects their applications. Consider honing and polishing engine air intakes with diamond powder slurry to mirror finishes. Turns out that machining or laser cross hatching the inner surfaces of the intake allow the air to move into the engine with even better flow performance since the cross hatching introduces microstructure boundary layers that act like a virtually no resistance lubricant to the flowing incoming air or air and fuel mixtures.

Texturing the engine intake surfaces makes them flow better than mirror polishing, possibly a counter intuitive idea that requires more understanding of surface microstructures to make the cross hatching the best size and shape to reduce gas flow resistance. This has many other applications where gasses or fluids are flowing through pipes at oil refineries or similar chemical processing in what can further improve energy efficiency or performance of these processing systems. 

Computational modeling enables novel products to be made with 3D printing or additive manufacturing that are nearly impossible to make with CNC or subtractive machining or injection molding. Some rocket nozzles are made with titanium powder & laser sintering in industrial 3D printing applications, as a single large complex part that replaces a similar part made from dozens of machined parts that have to be painstakingly assembled. 

3D metal powder printing enables SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, NASA and others to test many more nozzle designs faster, to accomplish greater final optimization to improve the longevity of the nozzle for longer burn times as rockets launch things into space. The RL25 engines from NASA that burn cryogenic H2 and cryogenic O2 are an example of highly optimized rocket engines made at great cost using government funding. Private aerospace companies have to stay profitable, so 3D printing, and computer modeling make such optimizations feasible at costs that private capital can afford. 

In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules (a model of computation, a computer's instruction set, a programming language, or a cellular automaton) is said to be Turing-complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine (English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing). This means that this system is able to recognize or decide other data-manipulation rule sets. Turing completeness is used as a way to express the power of such a data-manipulation rule set. Nearly all programming languages today are Turing-complete.

Turing equivalence – two computers P and Q are called equivalent if P can simulate Q and Q can simulate P.

The Church–Turing thesis conjectures that any function whose values can be computed by an algorithm can be computed by a Turing machine, and therefore that if any real-world computer can simulate a Turing machine, it is Turing equivalent to a Turing machine. A universal Turing machine can be used to simulate any Turing machine and by extension the computational aspects of any possible real-world computer.

To show that something is Turing-complete, it is enough to show that it can be used to simulate some Turing-complete system. No physical system can have infinite memory, but if the limitation of finite memory is ignored, most programming languages are otherwise Turing-complete.

Golly is a free computer software that lets you play with the artistic front end of the GIF image at the top of the post that depicts glider synthesis in Gosper's Cellular Automatic Gun. So even computers with limited memory, 64GB or less for example, can run complex simulations. Moreover, computers connected online to controller servers can form virtual clusters, and these methods being used in the Protein Fold search for example to try and understand how cells take biomolecules and making proteins and flesh, how aging happens & what happens during healing. 

To understand life at the atomic level, we need to know more about how life develops, what living means at the biochemical level, since we already know that enzymes and catalysts loan their valence electrons to lower the activation energy to cause a chemical or biochemical reaction to proceed from input chemicals to output chemicals. 

In medicine and agriculture, a greater understanding of the basic mechanisms of life will enable better cheaper more effective treatments, more cures for many diseases, even age reversal. New pest management strategies developed by understanding the biochemical aspects of pests more will reduce pesticide use and improve the ecological performance of farming at industrial scale. For example, chemically sterilizing the pests can be accomplished with very small amounts of synthetic hormones applied to cultivated plants. This way when the pest eats the plants, they do not die, but are unable to reproduce.