I've sometimes thought it might be reasonable to think of a single cell in the system as an 'automaton' which might make it somewhat ok to call the whole collec

I've sometimes thought it might be reasonable to think of a single cell in the system as an 'automaton' which might make it somewhat ok to call the whole collection of cells 'automata'. I accept that there's two levels here though and sometimes people refer to the system as a whole as being a single automaton even if there's loads of cells.