USA This is an abstract for a presentation given at the Sixth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology . There will be a link from here to the full article when it is available on the web. We desire the ability to design molecular-scale components and new materials using a heuristic programming technique such as genetic algorithms. To this end we have been investigating the possibility of designing new materials in the space of cellular automata.
Molecules interact, more or less, only with their nearest neighbors.
We empirically find a mapping between the automaton rule table and the surface physics of the crystal. The full text of this paper will appear in Gurney et al. This mapping relation could be very difficult to obtain. Further, the elements manipulated by the heuristic program should naturally be the rule table for the automaton not the CA space directly. Of course, the mapping between the rules and the CA structures, or CA space, are found by simply running the cellular automata.