Cellular

A row of cells, a rule about neighbours, and one line drawn per step. That’s all of it, and somewhere in the 256 ways of setting it up, it starts producing things nobody put there.

Rule 30 turns a single black cell into noise good enough that it once shipped as a random number generator. Rule 110 does something stranger: it is Turing complete, which means this toy is technically a computer. Most of the other 254 settle into stripes or die out, and the interesting part is that you cannot tell which is which by reading the rule. You have to run it.

Every complexity measurement sits next to the pixels that produced it, so entropy and correlation and Langton’s λ stop being abstract numbers and become a caption for the picture you’re already looking at. The chaotic/complex boundary is marked where it actually breaks down.

Things to try

• Run rule 30 and then rule 32 and notice they are one bit apart.
• Put rule 110 beside rule 90 and watch structure argue with symmetry.
• Sort by a metric and see which rules the numbers group together.
• Find the edge of the chaotic band and work along it.

Why it’s a speck

There’s nothing to win here. You’re browsing a zoo of very small machines, and you leave when you’re done.

Open Cellular