I've been reading a lot about cellular automata, which is a fancy name for pretty squares that change color. Each frame, the color of a square is determined by a simple rule based on the previous colors of itself and its neighbors. Certain rulesets create really complex and fractal-like patterns.
I started playing around with rendering some in Flash. Here's the result:
cylic cellular automaton (click to start a new pattern)
source
Reminds me of those early 90's screen savers. :)
The interesting thing about these automata is that they are actually carrying out computation. The rule by which the cells change can be viewed as hardware, and the initial state of the cells is software. For example, Rule 184 can be used to describe traffic flow. Rule 110 is even a universal Turing machine, meaning it can be functionally equivalent to any computer! Some of them can even self-replicate.
If this sounds interesting to you, you should take a look at Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, which is free to read online. He's spent years researching cellular automata, and has discovered tons of interesting properties about them. He even proposes that the laws of physics could be based on cellular automata -- that the fundamental basis of physics is not matter and energy, but computation and operations on information!
Sispri
LOL