Cellular automaton, genetic algorithms, neural nets, artificial life, robotics, artificial intelligence.

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"To my way of thinking, cellular automata are rich enough to symbolize everything: society, the brain, physics, whatever. The whole thing with a cellular automaton is that you have a tiny tiny program that is obeyed by each pixel or screen cell. With each tick of the system clock, the cells all look at their nearest neighbors and use the tiny program to decide what to do next. Incredibly rich patterns arise: tapestries, spacetime diagrams, bubble chamber photos, mandalas, you name it. Each pattern is a screenful of info, about 100,000 bits, but the pattern is specified by a very short rule, sometimes as short as 8 bits. The 'extra' information comes from timeflow, from the runtime invested, from the logical depth of the computation actually done." --Rudy Rucker (in "Report from Silicon Valley", Science Fiction Eye , August 1988).