Cellular automata are a foundational concept in computing and the sciences, including Earth and Planetary Sciences. They are used to model various geographic phenomena by simulating spatial systems and their interactions based on proximity, distance, and diffusion.

We first consider the situation in which one species, called the prey, has an ample food supply and the second species, called the predators, feeds on the prey. Examples of prey and predators include rabbits and wolves in an isolated forest, food fish and sharks, aphids and ladybugs, and bacteria and amoebas.

In the algorithm randomly generated solutions are assigned as a predator and preys depending on their performance on the objective function. Their performance can be expressed numerically and is called the survival value. A prey will run towards the pack of preys with better surviving values and away from the predator.

There are many types of CA. The simplest type is a binary, nearest-neighbor, one-dimensional automaton called elementary cellular automata. There are 256 such CAs. Another type of CA is the nearest-neighbor, k-color, one-dimensional totalistic cellular automata.