Fun with Cellular Automata

I saw an example in A New Kind of Science of a cellular automaton that would generate the square of any natural number entered into it. A cellular automaton is basically a set of cells that are all connected to each other in the same way and each are at one of a particular number of states. Each cell at each step is updated by whatever rules you choose, based on the states of the cells connected to it. it. Anyway, this cellular automaton could compute the squares of natural numbers. Each square in it used only the 3 squares directly above it to determine its color, using 8 colors. I thought that was interesting, so I decided to try making one myself. My first attempt used 9 colors, and for some reason I didn't save the rules to that one, but I soon found how to reduce it to 8 colors. Here's a picture of how it calculates the squares of the numbers from 1 to 5. This one requires an input of n black squares followed by an orange square and returns a row of n^2 black squares. It follows basically the same idea as Wolfram's version, so far as I can tell by looking at the picture. The idea is, for a given n, to add n together n times. I stayed up all Sunday night making this. I couldn't stop myself. These are my next two attempts. In the left one, I was able to alter the design slightly to make it work for only 7 colors, and in the left one I compacted it some more for only 6. These two take an input of n black squares and return a row of n^2 red squares. You can see how each time I was able to improve the design to allow for fewer colors. Some time and frustration later, however, I was still unable to make this basic design work for 5 colors. I worked and worked, and almost had it, but each time something would screw up right at the very end, and any attempt to fix it would invariably cause it to go completely haywire. However, Wednesday afternoon, I suddenly thought of a different design that I thought could work much more easily. THIS was the result. It's pretty obvious from looking at this that it is rather different from the previous 3. It's based on the fact that the nth square is always the sum of the first n odd numbers. So for example 1^2=1, 2^2=1+3, 3^2=1+3+5, 4^2=1+3+5+7, etc. It's easy to prove if you draw a picture. Anyway, the expanding blue region effectively counts off odd numbers, while the region on the left grows larger until it gets too close to the blue region. Each number is entered as a row of black, followed by a blue and a yellow. Isn't it cool!? Incedentally, in the course of these experiments, I discovered another use for my synesthesia. All the colors in the pictures are the colors I have for the numbers that I used to designate them when I was programming. It was very helpfull because I could look at the picture and immediately see the rule I had to change or add because the colors so strongly suggest the numbers that represented them. I'm done with A New Kind of Science. It's really an amazing book, and it gets more amazing with each chapter. Every chapter has some amazing new revelation about something, although it is one of the freakist and most obnoxious books I've ever read. All of these pictures were made with Mathematica. It's the easiest way I know of to program, and it's more addictive than a nintendo.