Simple rules, behaviour nobody put there

Every cell looks at its eight neighbours and follows one rule that fits on a line. Nothing in that rule mentions gliders, oscillators or spirals, and yet some rules produce them. That gap — between what is specified and what appears — is what emergence means, and it is the only thing this module is about.

The rule space has 262,144 members and perhaps a dozen have names. Almost everything you can dial here is genuinely unexplored, which is why novelty is measured against the rule rather than against the picture: the rule is the hypothesis, and the seed is one trial of it. Change the seed and the pattern changes; change the rule and the kind of pattern changes.

A discrete toy model of emergence, not a simulation of any physical system. What it demonstrates about complexity from simple rules is real; what it demonstrates about physics is nothing.