But in other cases it happens only rather slowly.

A highly compressed representation of the evolution of rule 110 from random initial conditions in which only the first cell in every 14×7 block is sampled.

The second set of pictures below illustrate the main difficulty: given only its pattern of connections, a particular network can be laid out in many completely different ways, most of which tell one very little about its potential correspondence with ordinary space. … (a) nodes arranged around a circle; (b) nodes arranged along a line; (c) nodes arranged across the page according to distance from a particular node; (d) 2D layout with network and spatial distances as close as possible; (e) planar layout; (f) 3D layout.

For the underlying rules specify only what the pattern of connections in a network should be—not how its nodes should be laid out on the page.

But given only a causal network, what can one say about the evolution history?

Pointers are used only for repeats that are of length at least 4.

The pictures on the right are obtained by keeping only the steps indicated by arrows on the left, corresponding to times when the active cell in the mobile automaton is further to the left than it has ever been before.

For as we discussed on page 83 , neighbor-independent substitution systems can generate only patterns that are either repetitive or nested—so they can never yield the more complicated patterns that are, for example, needed to emulate rule 30.

The left-hand side of each rule must consist of one non-terminal symbol, and the right-hand side can contain only one non-terminal symbol. … Context-free languages can be recognized by a computer using only memory on a single last-in first-out stack.

In airflow past an airplane there is however typically only a one-inch layer on each surface where such issues are important; the large-scale features of the remainder of the flow, which nevertheless accounts for only about half the drag on the airplane, can usually be studied without reference to turbulence. … In essentially all practical situations, Mach numbers close to one occur only at extremely high Reynolds numbers—where turbulence in any case would make it impossible to work out the detailed consequences of the Navier–Stokes equations.