Stephen Wolfram

You just try all the different rules and see what they do.

It's kind of like, you know, you've invented a computational telescope.

You just pointed at the most obvious thing in the sky.

And then you just see what's there.

And so I did that.

And I was making all these pictures of how cellular automata work.

And starting these pictures, I studied in great detail.

You can number the rules for cellular automata.

And one of them is rule 30.

So I made a picture of rule 30 back in 1981 or so.

And rule 30, well, at the time, I was just like, okay, it's another one of these rules.

It happens to be asymmetric left-right, asymmetric.

And it's like, let me just consider the case of the symmetric ones just to keep things simpler, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I just kind of ignored it.

And then...

And actually in 1984, strangely enough, I ended up having an early laser printer, which made very high resolution pictures.

And I thought, I'm going to print out an interesting, you know, I want to make an interesting picture.

Let me take this rule 30 thing and just make a high resolution picture of it.

And I did, and it has this very remarkable property that its rule is very simple.

You start it off just from one black cell at the top, and it makes this kind of triangular pattern.