He is a researcher in the field of artificial life and complex systems. He developed many tools and systems that the Alife community still uses today.
He studied many interesting properties of cellular automata, including the influence of the \(\lambda\) parameter on the chaotic behavior of these CA. A phase transition occurs for certain values of \(\lambda\), which was coined the edge of Chaos (Langton 1990).
He created a particular self-replicating cellular automaton: the langton loop (Langton 1984).