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Cellular Automata (CA) are generally acknowledged to be a powerful way to describe and model natural phenomena [1–3]. There are even tempting claims that nature itself is one big (quantum) information processing system, e.g. [4], and that CA may actually be nature’s way to do this processing [5–7]. We will not embark on this philosophical road, but ask ourselves a more mundane question. Can we use CA to model the inherently multi-scale processes in nature and use these models for efficient simulations on digital computers?