Edward Forrest Moore (November 23, 1925 in Baltimore, Maryland – June 14, 2003 in Madison, Wisconsin) was an American professor of mathematics and computer science, the inventor of the Moore finite state machine, and an early pioneer of artificial life.
With John Myhill, Moore proved the Garden of Eden theorem characterizing the cellular automaton rules that have patterns with no predecessor.
In a 1956 article in Scientific American, he proposed "Artificial Living Plants," which would be floating factories that could create copies of themselves.
They could be programmed to perform some function (extracting fresh water, harvesting minerals from seawater) for an investment that would be relatively small compared to the huge returns from the exponentially growing numbers of factories.
At Bell Labs he authored "Variable Length Binary Encodings", "The Shortest Path Through a Maze", "A simplified universal Turing machine", and "Complete Relay Decoding Networks".