So I was reading wikipedia today – just doing some reading on Alan Turing when I came across a reference to Konrad Zuse – another famous pioneer of early computers. I notice a really interesting note about Zuse and Cellular Automaton (CA):

Calculating Space[edit]

In 1967, Zuse also suggested that the universe itself is running on a cellular automaton or similar computational structure (digital physics); in 1969, he published the book Rechnender Raum (translated into English asCalculating Space). This idea has attracted a lot of attention, since there is no physical evidence against Zuse’s thesis. Edward Fredkin (1980s), Jürgen Schmidhuber (1990s), and others have expanded on it.

Source:Wikipedia

I have written a few tutorials on CA in dungeon building but if you are interested in more information on CA check out the excellent Wiki http://pcg.wikidot.com/ maintained by Andrew Doul