Everything below is currently just a brain dump of ideas I don't know where else to put.
I've been imagining how a cellular automata-based UI framework would work. This is considering that neighboring rules and the grid they play in are just one way of existing — the grid could be a hierarchichal or tree-shaped space that contains UI at a particular event-state, and the neighboring rules the proximity or relationship based on their available actions.
I was thinking that maybe this would help with animations and other transition effects.