Breaking Barriers in Cellular Automata with CAX: Faster, Scalable, and Open for All

Cellular automata (CA) have become essential for exploring complex phenomena like emergence and self-organization across fields such as neuroscience, artificial life, and theoretical physics. Yet, the lack of a hardware-accelerated cellular automata library has created a barrier to innovation, collaboration, and reproducibility within these areas.

To address this gap, in a new paper CAX: Cellular Automata Accelerated in JAX, an Imperial College London research team introduces CAX (Cellular Automata Accelerated in JAX), a powerful and adaptable open-source library designed to enhance CA research. Built on JAX (Bradbury et al., 2018), a high-performance numerical computing library, CAX enables rapid CA simulations through extensive parallelization on various hardware accelerators, including CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs.

CAX is an open-source library with cutting-edge performance, designed to provide a flexible and efficient framework for cellular automata research. CAX is built on JAX (Bradbury et al., 2018), a high-performance numerical computing library, enabling to speed up cellular automata simulations through massive…