I was only getting started! There are so many much more interesting cellular automata than Life, which is so overrated. As Marvin the Paranoid Android says, "Life? Don't talk to me about life! Loathe it or ignore it. You can't like it."

The classic book on the subject is "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling" [1]

This article has a lot of great references: "When–and how–can a cellular automaton be rewritten as a lattice gas?" [2].

And Fredkin's "Digital Mechanics: An Informational Process Based on Reversible Universal Cellular Automata" [3] is also a classic paper about the subject.

Fredkin, Toffoli, Margolus and others have done a lot of interesting research into reversible computation, which has many practical and theological [4] applications, and will some day be very useful at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe [5].

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cellular-automata-machines

[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304397508...

[3] https://books.google.com/books?id=6o6zx5MRRcQC&pg=PA254&lpg=...

[4] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15665399.2010.108...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point