 The father of CA is John von Neumann (von Neumann 1951). Working on self-replication and attempting to provide a reductionist theory of biological development, von Neumann was trying to conceive a system capable of producing exact copies of itself. Now biology prima facie appears to be the realm of fluidity and continuous dynamics. But following a suggestion of his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann decided to focus on a discrete, two-dimensional system. Instead of just black-or-white cells, von Neumann’s automaton used 29 different states and rather complicated dynamics, and was capable of self-reproduction. Von Neumann’s CA was also the first discrete parallel computational model in history formally shown to be a universal computer, i.e.,  capable of emulating a universal Turing machine and computing all  recursive functions (see entry).  