it's well known that there's lots of simple rulesets for cellular automata that yield complex behavior—take for example Conway's "Game of Life", on a 2D grid, which is just one of a family of rulesets that generate self-sustaining patterns.
now I find myself wondering: have people tried to add mutability to rulesets for cellular automata? is it possible to devise a cellular automaton whose ruleset is relatively tolerant of mutation—i.e. twiddling it changes the resulting behavior but doesn't destroy the tendency to create complex patterns? ~Chara