Here Wolfram is closing in on the real reason for the Book. In this chapter, he lays out the ideas behind cellular automata, nesting, and nobody has paid much attention to any of it. The technical part really starts to kick in during the notes section where he shows how to run the experiments using his "mathematica" program. To give you some idea of the detail he employs, chapter two is about twenty-eight pages long, but the notes run another seventeen. And the notes are in much smaller type and set in two columns.

This is where he shows what happens when the most simple of programs are allowed to run on and on. I'm not going to even try and sketch out his notation for cellular automata. If you want to look at the rich illustrations for this book, go to www.wolframscience.com. The entire damn book is available on line.

But what you soon discover is that given a cell, you can build up an entire pattern from that one cell by, one line at a time, specifying a rule as to how each subsequent cell has to appear. Take a line of cells, all white with one black one in the middle. Then look at any cell and the one to the right hand side. If both of these cells were white on the initial or previous step, then the new cell must be the color of the one on the left. If they weren't, it becomes the opposite. Simple? Not really. Run it about eight thousand times and you discover the most interesting patterns where none existed before.

Now where did these patterns emerge? You can't analyze the pattern and create a simple formula that will, in one shot, duplicates the pattern. They appear random. The only way to get these patterns is to take the inititial concise cellular formula and fire it up. Such is the basis for the entire Book.