One of the first cellular automata to be studied (and probably the most popular of all time) is a 2D CA called “The Game of Life,” or GoL for short. It was developed by John H. Conway and popularized in 1970 in Martin Gardner’s column in Scientific American. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_Game_of_Life for more information.

The cells in GoL are arranged in a 2D grid, either infinite in both directions or wrapped around. A grid wrapped in both directions is called a torus because it is topographically equivalent to the surface of a doughnut; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus.

Each cell has two states (live and dead) and eight neighbors (north, south, east, west, and the four diagonals). This set of neighbors is sometimes called a Moore neighborhood.