Researchers Introduce Programmable Cellular Automata: CA Rules as Readable Code

SimonGColton · x · 2026-09-10

Togelius and colleagues present a new paper on Programmable Cellular Automata (PCA). They argue classic CA rules are just lookup tables with limited expressiveness, while neural cellular automata are expressive but a black box. PCA's middle ground: each CA rule is written as human-readable code, combining editability with expressiveness. The authors say they're surprised the idea hasn't been explored before and report interesting results.

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