Also check out the "Moveable Feast Machine", Robust-first Computing, and this Distributed City Generation example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21858577
DonHopkins on Oct 26, 2017 | parent | favorite | on: Cryptography with Cellular Automata (1985) [pdf]
A "Moveable Feast Machine" is a "Robust First" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. It's similar to a Cellular Automata, but it different in several important ways, for the sake of "Robust First Computing". These differences give some insight into what CA really are, and what their limitations are.
Cellular Automata are synchronous and deterministic, and can only modify the current cell: all cells are evaluated at once (so the evaluation order doesn't matter), so it's necessary to double buffer the "before" and "after" cells, and the rule can only change the value of the current (center) cell. Moveable Feast Machines are like asynchronous non-deterministic cellular automata with large windows that can modify adjacent cells.
Here's a great example with an amazing demo and explanation, and some stuff I posted about it earlier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973
Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation:
David Ackley's[1] real-life hardware implementation of Robust-First Computing is at a new YouTube channel called the T2 Tile Project[2]. He jumpstarted the new channel after retiring from University of New Mexico. He releases new updates every Tuesday like clockwork. This is all he thinks, talks, dreams about and builds. It's amazing.
[1] https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A
Ackley is literally thinking hundreds of years ahead of the hardware we have. It's a shame that his ideas will probably never make much of a dent in the current computing ecosystem