Cellular automata between life science and parametric design: Examples of stochastic models to simulate natural processes and generate morphogenetic artefacts

Abstract

Cellular automata are models that deal with both nature and artefacts: they can indeed simulate living beings as well as be employed in the creation of objects. After the introduction of this concept by Stanislaw Ulam and John Von Neumann in the late 1940s, many different kinds of cellular automata have been created and have become part of what Christopher Langton called “artificial life” in 1986. The most complex examples among them are based on stochastic development, thus they share their structural properties with morphogenetic models like the one suggested by Alan Turing (1952). This is the reason why some cellular automata are capable of simulating the development of living beings, but also of cities and artefacts. They are indeed widely used in computer graphics related to parametric design, in order to create performative objects at various scales that can be produced according to the principle of mass customisation. The purpose of this study is to analyse the properties of these models with the help of computer simulations and, as a consequence, to explore some of their different fields of application. As a result, it can be observed that these processes, based on a stochastic geometry, can lead not only to simple biomimicry (regarded as the artificial replication of biological features) but also, in a wider sense, to bioinspiration (a more general relation between nature and artefacts based on shared structural properties).