CA is a pretty broad topic with a lot of work having been done on it. I've had a tangential interest in it since I was young and have read a bit (but only a bi

CA is a pretty broad topic with a lot of work having been done on it. I've had a tangential interest in it since I was young and have read a bit (but only a bit) of the research. In terms of practical applications, I know CAs are used in simulation of various types. The earliest I recall hearing about was use of CA to simulate the spread of wildfires taking geography and plant growth into account. I've also seen multiple attempts at using CA to simulate dynamic flows, sort of an alternative to Navier-Stokes solving, but I don't think that's used commercially. Just recently I came across a paper using CAs for both image compression and data encryption. The image compression worked a lot like fractal image compression, relying on the fact that any contractive mapping has an eventual fixed point under repeated iteration. The paper was a difficult read and felt like nothing more than an attempt by the author to get people to buy his book, not giving any detail about hardly anything.