Stephen Wolfram

that's not such a good sign.

If they're like, oh, this is great, that means you didn't really discover anything interesting.

Yeah, yeah, right.

So, I mean, the most interesting thing about cellular automata is that it's hard to figure stuff out about them.

In a sense, every time you try and bash them with some other technique, you say, can I crack them?

The answer is they seem to be uncrackable.

They seem to have the feature that they're sort of showing irreducible computation.

You're not able to say, oh, I know exactly what this is going to do.

It's going to do this or that.

But there's specific formulations of that fact.

Yes, right.

So, I mean, for example, in rule 30, in the pattern you get just starting from a single black cell, you get this sort of very, very sort of random looking pattern.

And so one feature of that, just look at the center column.

For example, we've used that for a long time to generate randomness in Wolfen language, just what rule 30 produces.

The question is, can you prove how random it is?

For example, one very simple question, can you prove that it will never repeat?

We haven't been able to show that it will never repeat.

We know that if there are two adjacent columns, we know they can't both repeat.

But just knowing whether that center column can ever repeat, we still don't even know that.

Another problem that I sort of put in my collection of, you know, it's like $30,000 for these three prizes for