James Grime (of, perhaps, Numberphile fame) made a video about it [1].
He also talks about how it's supposed to be related to Conway's game of life but is actually not (Conway's game of life is a 2D cellular automaton, while rule 30 is 1D).
He also talks about how it's supposed to be related to Conway's game of life but is actually not (Conway's game of life is a 2D cellular automaton, while rule 30 is 1D).
You can take a 2D automaton like Conway's Game of Life and turn time into a third dimension, giving you a single static volume. Has anyone tried doing that and 3D printing it?
Perhaps easier than 3D printing would be stacked laser-cut acrylic sheets. You could use transparent and partially opaque colors for dead and live cells, which lets you see the interior 3D structures more clearly than purely opaque 3D printed structures. I think the optical quality would likely be a lot better than anything I've seen 3d printed.
I'm interested enough in this idea to see if I can come up with some interesting figures to make.