Wednesday, May 2

A pied kiwi: wikipedia BURNS MY EYES

So I'm flipping through Wikipedia's articles on complexity theory and cellular automata, by way of reading about the controversies related to Stephen Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science. This was all sparked by news of Mathematica 6's release.

Then, I stumble upon the fascinating fact that some very simple rules are Turing Complete. In the process, I read a certain Wikipedia article, the object of today's post, that has visual examples of the basic computations that Rule 110 is capable of performing.

These images (in fact, almost all conventional images of one-dimensional cellular automata) would be a lot more interesting if I could look at them for longer than 3 nanoseconds.

Warning: severe eyeball abrasion ahead.

The Rule 110 Cellular Automaton (scroll down for images)


1 comment:

Fraxas said...

Must be residual vampire genes. at least you've developed the proper aversion response.