This is a demonstration of the evolution of an elementary cellular automaton according to rule 30 introduced by Stephen Wolfram (1983) and described in detail here.

The basic rules involve determining the state of a cell (black or white) in the next generation of the automaton based on its immediate neighbors. The eight possible scenarios are illustrated below, where the middle cell is the cell in question and the bottom cell is its state in the next generation.

It's important to note that the Elementary Cellular Automaton is one-dimensional. The image produced serves purely to show its evolution from a single cell according to rule 30 over many generations and does not describe the automaton as a whole.

This implementation is coded in JavaScript and relies on the HTML5 canvas element for rendering the cellular automaton. Each pixel in the bitmap represents a cell and each row of pixels depicts a generation of the automaton.

This page is responsive and thus the size of automaton drawn depends on your window size. The evolution of the automaton may be paused and restarted at any time. A larger window will be able to render more generations of the automaton. You may use your browser's zoom functionality to inspect the image in more detail or download a copy using the button.