The humble cellular automaton is a well-studied concept in computer science and has been around for many decades.

A very famous cellular automaton is Conway's Game of Life, which models a simple two-dimensional system of cells living and dying. This cellular automaton, and many others like it, are expressly designed to simulate some aspect of the real world, however simplified the model might be.

I instead like to design cellular automata that have pretty animations and do not attempt to model reality in any way.

In this talk I'll present my small cellular automaton framework "graffito" that I have been working on for the past three years in my spare time. I'll give a few examples of how I like to go about creating new automata and try to inspire you to create your own. I think it's really fun, and sometimes you might surprise yourself with something very cool-looking!

graffito is written in the Futhark programming language, but the takeaways from this talk will be applicable to any language you might want to use for writing cellular automata.