even though cellular automata and waveform collapse do completely different things, they somehow produce visually similar results
neurons in a brain are in a sense neighbour-computing agents, learning to fire at the right time, based on the surrounding neurons (physical distance) and the environment
the techniques for querying for neighbours (up/down/left/right) keep popping up in various places - from implementing basic image filters, to GP-GPU simulation techniques, to cellular automata
in the Homoiconic Spreadsheets Eli Parra gives an example of building up a "streak counter" using a calculation based on specific condition on the canvas (of the cell and its neighbours):
[is-checked]
[prev-streak] [= if (is-checked) then (prev-streak + 1) else 0]
this could possibly mix very well with the ideas of "spatial queries" explored in the Programmable Ink (and Dynamicland), where a pattern like the one above wouldn't be copy-pasted around, but instead declared once (as a "match" on a specific configuration of the cells on the canvas)