GART

Cellular Automata

One row of cells, one rule, and the row below follows from the three cells above it. Eight bits of instruction are enough to produce order, chaos or something that does both at once.

Cellular Automata: One row of cells, one rule, and the row below follows from the three cells above it. Eight bits of instruction are enough to produce order, chaos or something that does both at once.Cellular Automata: One row of cells, one rule, and the row below follows from the three cells above it. Eight bits of instruction are enough to produce order, chaos or something that does both at once.

About this pattern

Stephen Wolfram · elementary cellular automata

Cellular Automata, elementary cellular automaton, drawn by GART: One row of cells, one rule, and the row below follows from the three cells above it. Eight bits of instruction are enough to produce order, chaos or something that does both at once.
Cellular Automata · CC BY 4.0

Each cell reads itself and its two neighbours, which gives eight possible neighbourhoods; a rule number is simply which of those eight turn the cell on, written in binary. Rule 90 draws a Sierpiński triangle, rule 30 is disordered enough to have been used as a random source, and rule 110 is capable of universal computation: in principle it can run any program. The row wraps at both edges, so the left and right sides are neighbours.

TopicsCellular automaton (opens in a new tab)Elementary cellular automaton (opens in a new tab)

Behind the mathematics

Stephen Wolframborn 1959

Elementary rules

British-American physicist and computer scientist who catalogued the elementary cellular automata and showed that rules of almost no complexity can produce behaviour of almost any complexity.