I should also say that phase transitions are used to describe the abrupt change in physical parameters as some external conditions are changed. Cellular automata to my knowledge don't really have continuously variable parameters.
> "In contrast to a well-mixed chemical reaction system, reaction–diffusion (RD) networks can produce spatial patterns, where some species are more abundant in some parts of the substrate and less abundant in others."
"Emulating cellular automata in chemical reaction–diffusion networks"
Long range order is sometimes exhibited by cellular automata, but cellular automata is too general a framework much of the time to be a useful calculational tool.
In other words, they do know of it, and the formalism doesn't make these kinds of predications to my knowledge
They should really stop linking things to "phase transitions". This is most likely something that follows the Tracy Widom distribution, that has popped up in many areas of maths and physics. Linking this to phase transitions is like saying: "weather predictions linked to the physics of a dice being rolled"
More people will have heard of phase transitions than T-W and it's certainly not inaccurate while also using somewhat familiar analogies; so I think your criticism doesn't make much sense for a popular science article.
I disagree, I love Quanta magazine precisely because of this kind of story telling. And aside from that, these researchers are developing a kind of statistical mechanics of "active matter". Why shouldn't such a theory involve "phase transitions"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton
EDIT: Appreciate the feedback from you two. :)