Is Life Alone in the Universe of Symmetric Cellular Automata?

A cellular automaton has local rules that apply to an array of states in parallel at each step. These arrays can evolve to yield visually striking patterns. Cliff first bumped into cellular automata in 1974 and thought they were crazy stuff. While cellular automata have applications to topics such as spot formation, self-organizing structures in catalytic reactions and snowflake growth, the theme of this talk is finding the crazy stuff cellular automata can do. Input Entropy, gliders, mutation of the rules, and symmetry are key tools in that effort. His most recent cellular automata project involved the Lafayette EXCEL student Iñaki Minondo during the summers of 2019 and 2020.