Some Experiments on Repeatability of Wolfram’s Rule 30 (Written: 10/22/2004)

For my first CA programming task with Java, I decided to implement Wolfram’s rule 30. This led to some questions, i.e., just how wide should the cell row be, and what to do about the endpoints. When I started the work I could not find Wolfram’s discussion on the matter. (Yes I have his book and yes I have it online as well; I just missed it.) So I ran some studies myself. I discovered that the repetition period is actually very low. I was shocked at how low it is. My writeup can be found at expts_with_rule30