cellular automata!

Today I got bored, so I decided to make pretty pictures of the outputs of cellular automata. The code is here.

The code was pretty simple to write (although I don’t write much python so I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to do this) and it’s very simple to use – just pass in the image dimensions you want out, and the wolfram code of the 1D cellular automata you want to use. But it occured to me, that if Rule 110 is Turing complete (and apparently it is), then in a way, this is the fastest I’ve ever written a virtual machine! This is also probably the most inefficient, useless-virtual machine I could easily write, and in this case it happens to run on a random input, but whatever. It makes pretty pictures!

Rule 110 :

Rule 30 :

P.S. On the relocating to NYC front : I’ve been here a couple of weeks now. It’s cold, but busy and cool. Etsy is kinda awesome, both on a people front, and on a technical front (although search is more than a little broken; I have to work on that).