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cellular automaton 1 tile

Triangles, zigzags and chaotic textures that look like woven tapestry, punched tape or a seashell's markings. Some rules produce clean nested triangles; others look almost random.

An elementary cellular automaton is a row of black and white cells. Each new row is computed from the one above using a tiny rule that looks only at a cell and its two neighbors. Stacking hundreds of rows draws the pattern. Rules like these, studied systematically by Stephen Wolfram in the 1980s, show how very simple rules can produce structures that are anything but simple.

Every tile on tilejar starts as a crop of a larger image, which is then mirrored with a wallpaper symmetry (pmm, p4m or p6m) so it repeats without seams. Download it as a PNG or open its recipe in the generator.