# Elementary cellular automaton > [[PORTAL_Cellular_automaton|Cellular automaton]] spine. ## Microsims — three.js <div class="microsim-player"> <iframe src="https://wikitube-3d-microsims.netlify.app/Rule_30_elementary_CA.html" width="100%" height="520" frameborder="0" loading="lazy" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin" title="Elementary cellular automaton — three.js microsim"></iframe> </div> <p class="wt-pending"><strong>Note:</strong> staged, awaiting CDN deploy — one of [[PORTAL_Cellular_automaton]]'s five hand-built three.js stations.</p> An elementary cellular automaton is the simplest class of one-dimensional cellular automaton: a row of binary cells whose next state depends only on itself and its two immediate neighbours. That three-cell neighbourhood gives exactly 256 possible update rules — Stephen Wolfram's numbering scheme runs them 0 through 255 — and a single rule, applied over and over to a row seeded with one black cell, is enough to generate everything from simple nested triangles to statistically random-looking noise to Turing-complete computation. ## Overview Starting from a single black seed cell, successive generations stack upward as a 3D wall where height encodes time, turning a rule's entire history into one static structure once it stops advancing. This build lets a viewer scrub any rule code with a slider and watch the wall grow row by row, with live population and generation counters in the HUD. Rule 30, one member of this family, produces a pattern chaotic enough that Wolfram's own software once used its centre column as a pseudorandom number generator; rule 110 was proved Turing-complete. Both sit inside the same 256-rule space this microsim scrubs through directly, and the same neighbour-counting logic reused across the [[Cellular_automaton|cellular automaton]] family scales up to the two-dimensional Moore neighbourhood of [[Conway's_Game_of_Life|Conway's Game of Life]]. **On the spine:** [[Cellular_automaton]] · [[Conway's_Game_of_Life]] · [[Von_Neumann_neighborhood]] · [[Physics]] · [[Self-replication]]. ## Wikipedia : Wikitube **Strict pair:** [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_cellular_automaton) : [Wikitube](https://en.wikitube.io/wiki/Elementary_cellular_automaton) --- *Repopulated 2026-08-05 · existing three.js asset renamed + wired, Wikipedia-sourced overview · 0 deletions.*