The recent development of the lattice gas automata method and its extension to the lattice Boltzmann method have provided new computational schemes for solving a variety of partial differential equations and modeling chemically reacting systems. The lattice gas method, regarded as the simplest microscopic and kinetic approach which generates meaningful macroscopic dynamics, is fully parallel and can, as a result, be easily programmed on parallel machines. In this paper, we introduce the basic principles of the lattice gas method and the lattice Boltzmann method, their numerical implementations and applications to chemically reacting systems. Comparisons of the lattice Boltzmann method with the lattice gas technique and other traditional numerical schemes, including the finite difference scheme and the pseudo-spectral method, for solving the Navier-Stokes hydrodynamic fluid flows will be discussed. Recent developments of the lattice gas and the lattice Boltzmann method and their applications to pattern formation in chemical reaction-diffusion systems, multiphase fluid flows and polymeric dynamics will be presented.