Wolfram Physics Q&A

No. Cellular automata are very useful models for many things, and provided the intuition that led to the development of this model. But cellular automata as such have rigid predefined notions of space and time, and a critical feature of our models is that space and time are instead dynamic and emergent. Structurally, our models involve rewrite rules for collections or relations, or equivalently, for hypergraphs, rather than updates of values in pre-existing arrays of cells.