Designing a Granular Synthesiser with grains generated via Cellular Automata

Greetings all, this is my first post so please bear with me on the technical terms.

I am a doing my masters degree thesis on granular synthesis and cellular automata. I am trying to design a grnular synth and to use the data created by forms of cellular automata to control various parameters. Ideally the creation of the grains themselves but also grain time, duration, offset, stereo location of grains etc etc... whatever seems interesting and will produce interseting sounds.

I have a pretty good backgorund in the sound synthesis side of things but less so in the computing, coding, programming side but I have managed to work out Csound which seems a lot more taxing than Max so far (I'd be happy not to see Csound for a long time lol - but it is powerful). The idea for this project came after using Chaosynth
http://www.nyrsound.com/Chaosynth/CsynInformation.htm

I have started working through the tutorials and am making some decent progress. I have used the following patches as a reference on my computer (windows 7 running Max 5):
- Jit.conway
- mdegranular
(while certain objects/externals won't run on my version of max I can download trail version on my or uni computers if/when needed)

Both have provided me with the means of trying to reverse engineer (if thats a real term) through the patches learning the objects as I go. I have only been using Max for about a month now so am far from fluent but I get the main concepts of which objects I need to understand but am struggling at understanding all the maths and expressions as easily.

At this point it would be extremely helpfull if anyone had any advice on which areas I should get into first such as:
- learning all relevant math related topics (which ones are most fundamantal?)
- focussing on a specific area (such as Matricies, Controlling data flows, MSP specific stuff etc)
- perhaps learning existing patches inside out first ( CA, Granular, etc)

The 'Granular Cloud Generator' is a good example of the granular synth i would try to emulate (partially because I have been told it overcomes some time rleated problems that a simple MAX patch will encounter); if I could generate Cellular Automata output data and feed this into a similar granular instrument that would be perfect.

Also I trying to work out how to make the output of a matrix audible in a way that I can map each cell to a specific frequency and amplitude ( so when the Cellular automata evolve over time so will the corresponding amp of freq)

Sorry for the long post guys, any advice would be much much appreciated.
(thanks for taking the time to read it all!)