[marmakoide]

Self-plug here, but very related => Robustness and the Halting Problem for Multicellular Artificial Ontogeny (2011)

Cellular automata where the update rule is a perceptron coupled with a isotropic diffusion. The weights of the neural network are optimized so that the cellular automata can draw a picture, with self-healing (ie. rebuild the picture when perturbed).

Back then, auto-differentiation was not as accessible as it is now, so the weights where optimized with an Evolution Strategy. Of course, using gradient descent is likely to be way better.