>The notion of cellular automata goes back to von Neumann and Ulam, whom Feynman had known at Los Alamos. Richard's recent interest in the subject was motivated by his friends Ed Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, both of whom were fascinated by cellular automata models of physics. Feynman was always quick to point out to them that he considered their specific models "kooky," but like the Connection Machine, he considered the subject sufficiently crazy to put some energy into.

I am currently starting round four in my studies of CAs, and it I thought this quote was interesting in bridging the earlier work by von Neumann and Ulam to Ed Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram with Feynman in the middle spanning them.

The book, "Cellular Automata: A Discrete Universe" by Andrew Ilachinski, has had it critics, but it is an amazing compendium to read.