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■ Elementary Cellular Automata

Most of my current works use cellular automata as a procedural basis for further visual and auditive explorations. Cellular automata are discrete models of computation first derived by John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam in the 1940s. The simplest version of a CA is a one-dimensional grid of cells with 2 possible states (0 and 1) and a transition function, or rule, that only looks at the immediate neighbouring cells to the left and the right. The rule decides the new state of the centered cell in the next generation, dependent on the state of these three cells. These Elementary Cellular Automata, named and systematically studied by Stephen Wolfram starting in the 1980s, have thus 2⁸ = 256 total possible rules. Some exhibit chaotic behaviour and at least one is proven to be capable of universal computation, making it the simplest Turing complete system.