automata

The trade-off is that they need exponentially more states to do so than an equivalent CFG/pushdown automata.

If you're really interested in the topic, Jeff Ulman (who with Alfred Aho wrote the book on automata) teaches a course on automata via Coursera.

Also, for using cellular automata to eat your minecraft world, the Grey Goo mod is still the best, as it supports both automata[1] and something a bit higher-order[2].

It's a fairly decent introductory text to cellular automata, but it's not new, and wasn't back then either.

That's fine for sophisticated users who understand the context, but not for people who don't understand automata.

It ran something meant for cellular automata(?) which actually printed out the sender's name in the grid.

In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life.

A person could do worse than learning about automata from a person down a Stanford hallway from Donald Knuth's office.

Imagine that there are so many robots/automata up and running performing safety-critical, ongoing tasks - guiding air traffic for example.

The core conflict is between two different approaches to modeling, via mimicry of existing systems versus really interesting cellular automata.

Even computer science students graduate from school without having single idea of what automata is.

After that you should try to get through Ullman's Introduction to Automata Theory, the dragon book and Sipser's Introduction to Computation Theory.

Further growth and development of "humanity" as an organism selected for the growth of the cerebral cortex (automata) to assess, interpret and manage more complex internal and external interactions.

When I look back, the classes that I learned the most from were, Discrete Math, Automata, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, and Programming Language Concepts (which went into the academic side of programming language research more than what was currently in use in industry).