About

Three cells in, one cell out.

An elementary cellular automaton is a row of cells, each either alive or dead. To produce the next row you look at every cell together with its two neighbours — eight possible arrangements — and a rule tells you whether the cell below is alive or dead. Eight yes/no answers is one byte, so there are exactly 256 rules, numbered 0 to 255.

That is the whole system. There is no randomness in it anywhere. And yet Rule 30 produces a sequence so hard to predict that it shipped as a random number generator; Rule 110 was proven capable of running any computation at all; Rule 184 spontaneously reproduces the shockwave that travels backwards through a traffic jam. Nobody designed those behaviours. They were found.

How a shirt is made

Every design is a pure function of five numbers: the rule, the seed, the initial-row mode, the lattice width and the ink. When you order, we evolve the automaton again at print resolution and hand the resulting 3000 × 3758 PNG straight to the printer. The preview you approved and the file that hits the garment come from the same code path.

The background is transparent, so only live cells receive ink and the fabric colour shows through everywhere else. Prints are direct-to-garment on a Gildan 64000 unisex softstyle tee. Fibre content varies by garment colour. It is produced on demand by Prodigi and shipped from an available fulfilment facility.

Returns

Because each shirt is printed for one order, we can only replace items that arrive damaged or misprinted. Email a photo within 30 days and we will reprint it.