A New Kind of Network? Review and Reference Implementation of Neural Cellular Automata

TMLR Paper6403 Authors

Abstract:

Stephen Wolfram proclaimed in his 2003 seminal work ``A New Kind Of Science'' that simple recursive programs in the form of Cellular Automata (CA) are a promising approach to replace currently used mathematical formalizations, e.g. differential equations, to improve the modeling of complex systems.
Over two decades later, while Cellular Automata have still been waiting for a substantial breakthrough in scientific applications, recent research showed new and promising approaches which combine Wolfram's ideas with learnable Artificial Neural Networks: So-called Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) are able to learn the complex update rules of CA from data samples, allowing them to model complex, self-organizing generative systems.
The aim of this paper is to review the existing work on NCA and provide a unified theory, as well as a reference implementation in the open-source library NCAtorch.

Submission Type: Long submission (more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Sebastian_Goldt1

Submission Number: 6403