As the first author of the white paper, I had to say it was unfair to say IOTA did plagiarism.

Cellular automata is common knowledge everyone can develop new ideas from it. Just like it is unfair that if Von Neumann invented it and blamed Wolfram for plagiarism of cellular automata just because Wolfram made deep research on it and make it a more and more systematic theory. The cellular automata in NKN whitepaper was not realized at all as it described in whitepaper. The technical implementation use little cellular automata principle! It was just math and simulation. If someone understand it and the code in github, he would find there are two different things. So, it is unfair to blaming IOTA for plagiarism is ridiculous. On the contrary, IOTA’s technical statements are more detailed and executable, like a yellow paper. The NKN white paper says that all details need to refer to their Yellow paper. Where is the Yellow paper as they promised for over one year?