Elementary Cellular Automata — The Simplest Possible Rules
To understand cellular automata, start with the simplest possible version: a single line of cells, each either black or white, each updating based only on itself and its two immediate neighbors. These elementary cellular automata are about as minimal as a system can be — and yet, astonishingly, some of them produce patterns of unlimited complexity. This post is about the simplest CAs, how their 256 rules are numbered, and the shocking discovery that minimal rules can be maximally complex.
The simplest CA: a 1D line, two states, nearest-neighbor rules — minimal enough that there are exactly 256 rules, each named by a Wolfram number. The shock, found by enumerating all 256: behaviors range from boring to chaotic (Rule 30) to complex (Rule 110), and complexity appears even among the very simplest rules.