We haven’t yet discussed, however, what is perhaps the most important detail of how cellular automata work—time. We’re not really talking about real-world time here, but about the CA living over a period of time, which could also be called a generation and, in our case, will likely refer to the frame count of an animation. The figures above show us the CA at time equals 0 or generation 0. The questions we have to ask ourselves are: How do we compute the states for all cells at generation 1? And generation 2? And so on and so forth.