The critical NCA got perfect score in the 5-bit memory task and can surpass the performance of the best elementary CA, rule 30, in the MNIST classification.

This work was done together with @stenichele.bsky.social and @mikkellepperod.bsky.social

This Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) is a powered-up version of elementary Cellular Automata (CA), but it is controlled by an artificial neural network and with binary multi-channels. We evolve this NCA towards criticality and then evaluate it as a substrate for Reservoir Computing.