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Gnarly CAs:

Cellular Automata for Pattern Creation

Autonomous software bots can create complex, colorful digital patterns. You just have to tell them what to do. By Rudy Rucker

Cellular automata (CAs) are single-celled digital life forms that grow inside computer memory like bacteria, creating complex, beautiful patterns that you can copy-paste onto web pages and even onto clothing. They’re easy to make, because they literally make themselves.

I find CAs fascinating in the same way that I used to computer projector called a Light Valve, which love lava lamps — or blobby analog light shows in rock created its images — he claimed — by beaming concerts during the late 1960s and early 1970s, where a carbon arc-light through three screens that were images were generated by a projector shining through coated by ever-changing sprays of colored whale mixtures of colored oil and water in a glass dish. oil! Today when I speak in public, I don’t need to lug

When I moved to Silicon Valley in 1986, I looked up around bottles of colored oil to make my light show. the ur-hacker hero Bill Gosper. He was gloating about I can generate a shifting colored display of CAs just having given a talk using a fabulously expensive by hooking a computer projector to my laptop.

70 Make: Volume 12