Talk:Elementary cellular automaton/Infinite length
Edge bits
(about ignoring cells beyond the edges) But you can't stick to a simple version, and infinite padding beyond the edges must be included somehow. Suppose the visible part of the cells ends with "...110" and is followed by repeating 0s to infinity, and rule is just 1 (000->1). Now after one iteration those three cells become "000", but followed by repeating 1s instead. You can add another constraint that padding/edge cells don't change, but that would make the "infinite" part kind of pointless because changes won't propagate beyond edge cells. --Ledrug (talk) 17:54, 21 March 2014 (UTC)