Generative system advice needed

Hi all,

I'm trying to build a generative system (or more accurately, a metamorphosing system) to follow rules not available in the Conway or Lindenmayer objects (jit.conway; jit.linden).

What I need to be able to do - as efficiently as possible - is build a system that allows cells in an n-dimensional matrix to observe the behaviour of their neighbours and react according to a specific set of rules that I can write. How best can I build a system in which each cell can be 'aware' of several aspects of its neighbours' states (and act accordingly)? jit.conway does something like what I want to do, of course, in that each cell acts in a particular way, depending on the state of its neighbours. The rules it follows, however, are the not the rules I wish to apply.

I realise I could laboriously analyse the contents of a matrix by unpacking it, get each cell to look at each of its neighbours in turn etc. etc. I have, in fact, done this in various ways in 2D using Max. But this is an inefficient and slow way of doing things, and it's not easily translated from 2D into nD, where n is any number of dimensions.

Any advice/suggestions of objects to use/example patches gratefully received!

John