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Cellular automaton evolution illustrating the phenomenon of undecidability. Pattern (a) dies out after 36 steps; pattern (b) takes 1017 steps. But what the final outcome in cases (c) and (d) will be is not clear after even a million steps. And in general there appears to be no finite computation that can guarantee to determine the final outcome of the evolution after an infinite number of steps. The cellular automaton rule used is a 4-color totalistic one with code 1004600. Whether a pattern in a cellular automaton ever dies out can be viewed as analogous to a version of the halting problem for Turing machines.


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From Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science [citation]