We present the abstracts of the talks given during the workshop on cellular automata and their computer simulations which was held in Orsay.
Cellular automata, although invented over 40 years ago by J. yon Neumann, have only recently been applied succesfully to describe processes in nature ranging from cell differentiation in biology to hydrodynamics. Cellular automata are networks which have a discrete variable and a rule on each site. The rule determines the value of the variable at the next time step so that the cellular automaton describes the time development of any configuration of variables. For this reason cellular automata are dynamical systems with many degrees of freedom, and the application of methods from statistical physics to them has been particularly successful in recent years.