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Neighborhood (Range)

The neighborhood defines the number of other individual cells that a given cell interacts with. There are many ways to define a neighborhood, varying both its size and shape, but in this case the shape is fixed. The neighborhood in this case is always a Moore neighborhood which is a square. The size (range) of the neighborhood is allowed to vary from 1 to 3. This number indicates the number of cells in each direction that are included in the neighborhood of a given focal cell.

The neighborhoods are easier to visualize than they are to describe. Here are what the three neighborhoods in this model look like, where the focal cell is in red, and the neighborhood is in blue (in this model the focal cell itself is also considered to be in its own neighborhood):

 

Range 1

 

Range 2

 

Range 3