256 Universes in One Byte: Exploring 1D Cellular Automata
A row of cells. Each cell is either on or off. Every generation, each cell looks at itself and its two neighbors, then follows a rule to decide what it becomes next. That’s it. That’s the whole system.
From this absurdly simple setup, you get chaos, fractals, traffic jams, and even a system capable of computing anything a laptop can compute. All from one byte of information.
How It Works
The neighborhood is three cells wide: left, center, right. Since each cell can be 0 or 1, there are 2^3 = 8 possible patterns. A rule assigns an output (0 or 1) to each pattern. Eight binary choices = one byte = a number from 0 to 255.