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Automat

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Automat is a cellular automaton viewer. Each pixel in the automaton's canvas can either be black or white, and a pixel's color is set based on the colors of the three adjacent pixels above it. The eight diagrams in the control bar show the system's rules. You can change the output value of each rule by clicking the single square below the three inputs. Run and enjoy.

This sketch was created to visualize the examples in Stephen Wolfram's New Kind of Science.

Here are a few sets of rules to try:

  1. white, black, white, white, black, black, white, white
    This set of rules produces a very simple pattern. You'd
    probably expect that this is about the level of complexity
    that can be generated with such simple rules.

  2. white, black, black, white, black, white, white, white

  3. white, black, black, black, black, black, black, white
    The patterns generated by the above two set of rules
    are slightly more complex, but still show a large degree
    of regularity.

  4. white, black, black, black, white, black, black, white
    Wildly unpredictable output is also possible, however. This
    set of rules generates a pattern with a band along the left
    side and regularly occuring diagonal stripes, but there is no
    discernable pattern in the way the branch of larger triangles
    moves through the center.