That branch of cellular automata was the precursors for what we call AL/ML today. If I remember correctly Conways version was a simplified version from Von Neu

That branch of cellular automata was the precursors for what we call AL/ML today. If I remember correctly Conways version was a simplified version from Von Neumanns version. Where they used hard rules to affect the neighbors the weighting systems and functions we use now was an offshoot of that. They could even become interesting again if ML were to use those kind of rules to kill off/grow nodes.