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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24990v1
• Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:49:16 GMT
• Title: A New Kind of Network? Review and Reference Implementation of Neural Cellular Automata
• Abstract summary: This paper reviews the existing work on Neural Cellular Automata.<n>It provides a unified modular framework and notation, as well as a reference implementation in the open-source library NCAtorch.
• Score: 16.955147230677042
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• 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 modular framework and notation, as well as a reference implementation in the open-source library NCAtorch.

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