A SIMULATION OF THE IMMUNE SYSTEM: EXPERIMENTS IN MACHINA

Computer modelling can be a valuable adjunct in immunological research. It can be used both as a theoretical tool to explore and understand the behavior of immunological processes as well as in a mode to provide an additional experimental tool, experiments in machina, experiments in the computer. Cellular automata are particularly useful in this regard since they can easily handle the complexities and special cases inherent in the immune system. We describe a generalized cellular automaton that has been designed to model the humoral component of the immune system.