For the unfamiliar, could someone explain what I'm looking at? The abstract was a little too concrete (heh) for me to follow.
If you're familiar with CAs (e.g. Conway's Game of Life), you can think of a NeuralCA as a CA where the update rule is given by a neural network. Here we optimize the neural net weights so that it behaves a certain way (e.g. grow a lizard from a single seed).
The original NCA is probably a helpful intro: https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/