A new visual specification of cellular automata-like systems

It has been a long time since Von Neumann invented the cellular automata model. Many programming environments and languages were developed to specify and implement cellular automata-like systems (CA). Most of these languages focus on computational and performance issues, and provide a rather conventional view of the CA description. Visual methods are not often applied in CA specification, despite their advantages and the maturity of tools. A new approach to specify cellular automata systems is presented, where multiple views are simultaneously used to describe more comprehensively the required systems. Syntactic and semantic aspects of the corresponding models are captured using recognizable and intuitively clear interfaces. In this paper, we describe the design and development of the multiple views specification of CA, and present two examples from CA systems in visual format.