This isn't meant as some cheeky passive aggressive thing, but a genuine curiosity from someone who has always been really fascinated by CGOL and cellular automata in general: has there been any practical uses of cellular automata outside of hobbyist mathematics?

I read Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", and it certainly feels like there's a lot of value to be gleaned from Cellular Automata, but thus far I haven't seen anything terribly useful. I'm happy enough for it to just be a fun mathematics game, but it would be nice to be able to explain something useful coming from me spending hours and hours hacking together different Langton rules.