Cellular automata

From MathWorld: “A cellular automaton is a collection of ‘colored’ cells on a grid of specified shape that evolves through a number of discrete time steps according to a set of rules based on the states of neighboring cells.”

This example explores binary, nearest-neighbor, one-dimensional automata, of which there are 256 (2⁸) possible rules. All 256 rules are arranged in a grid, by column and then by row. The top-left corner is rule 0; the bottom-right corner is rule 255. Zoom in to see more of any particular rule.