A cellular automaton assigns one of finitely many states to each cell of a regular grid and updates cells in discrete generations using a fixed local rule. In the synchronous convention, each new state depends only on old states in a finite neighborhood. Conway's Game of Life supplies a concrete example with two states and eight neighbors; its global update is a function on complete configurations, with deterministic evolution.[ref]
https://github.com/nathanieljohnston/game-of-life-book/blob/master/early_life.tex. Johnston and Greene, chapter 1: Life and cellular automata
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A cellular automaton (CA) is a discrete model used in mathematics, computer science, physics, and other fields to simulate complex systems. It consists of a grid of cells, each of which can be in one of a finite number of states (like "on" or "off"). The grid can exist in various dimensions, but one-dimensional and two-dimensional grids are the most common.