# 1D Cellular Automata

**Track:** Physics, Motion & Emergence — Creative Coding — the existing 50
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** Arrays, Nested Loops & Grids

**In one line:** A one-line rule over a row of cells produces fractals.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

A one-dimensional cellular automaton is the minimal recipe for complexity: a single row of cells, each black or white, updated by a rule that reads only a cell and its two neighbors. Stephen Wolfram catalogued all 256 such rules in "A New Kind of Science" and found that a few—Rule 30, Rule 90—generate astonishing structure from a single seed. Rule 90 draws the Sierpiński triangle, a fractal nested in arithmetic; Rule 30 produces a stream so disordered it serves as a randomness source. The aesthetic is emergence at its starkest: deterministic, local, trivially simple, yet unfolding into patterns indistinguishable from the genuinely intricate.