Cellular
Explore every elementary cellular automaton rule through generated patterns and measures of order, sensitivity, and complexity.
Cellular is an atlas of all 256 elementary cellular automata. Every rule gets its generated pattern and, beside it, numbers describing what the pattern is actually doing.
What it shows
- Generated evolution for every elementary rule
- Density, row entropy, and row-to-row correlation
- Langton’s lambda and block entropy
- Perturbation lightcones, which flip a single cell at the seed and track how far the disagreement spreads
- Layered explanations, from high-school intuition up to the published literature
- Notes marking which measures are standard and which are the atlas’s own composite scores
Why measure the patterns?
Eyeballing a rule is unreliable: two patterns can look like the same static and behave quite differently when you poke them. Putting numbers next to the picture makes rules comparable, which is what you need before arguing about where periodic ends, chaos begins, and Class IV-like behaviour sits between them.
The composite scores are the atlas’s own, useful for ranking and sorting here but not published measures. The explanation panels say so, and point at Wuensche’s input entropy, the Z-parameter, and the other axes people have actually published.
Cellular is part of the Solves.ca family.