Oh man, that's awesome! Have you considered modeling a more "real-world" computing fabric? Your cells would have randomly-distributed computation and communication delays, and you could make some sort of visualization of the time waves propagating, and it would just be really cool.<p>I initially didn't think this would be possible to implement in simple physical hardware, but your insight that you only need a two-bit time counter changes things.<p>Of course, ultimately, I think what you'd want to look at is amorphous computing. It's a fascinating new branch of computer science that looks at organizing a large number of unreliable small processors, sensors, and actuators, with only local communication, into a working system. Here's the big intro paper (Abelson and Sussman are among the authors, BTW):<p><a href="http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/amorphous/papers/aim1665.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/amorphous/papers/ai...</a><p>I think you'll really enjoy amorphous computing. It's already getting some use in wireless sensor networks, especially the stuff having to do with establishing reliable communication channels, or figuring out the spatial distribution of the sensors based on ping times, or keeping clocks more-or-less synchronized.