Geographic Applications in Other Sciences

Cellular automata have also been used in a variety of social science applications outside the geographic sciences, largely due to their value in representing geography in simulation. Cellular automata with fundamental space–time representations have been used in anthropology, to model the formation of societies and in political science and sociology to explore civil violence. Cellular automata have been particularly useful in infusing geography into work in economics. Models developed by urban economists, for example, rely heavily on cellular automata to represent processes of urban agglomeration. Cellular automata models that are fundamentally geographic in inspiration have also been widely used in ecology to simulate floral and faunal dynamics and in biology, where they are employed in the modeling of cellular dynamics and tumor formation.