Wolfram’s Rule 34 for xkcd Readers

If you’re like me — geeky enough to have xkcd in your RSS reader, but not geeky enough to know what Wolfram’s Rule 34 is — you probably Googled it after seeing the alt text in today’s comic. Unfortunately, that turned out to be less than useful, at least initially. It’s an uncommon enough phrase that the first page of Google results were all spammers trying to capitalize on the phrase showing up as a hot search trend and creating a page to profit off of those poor, searching xkcd readers.

So I did the research and will try to explain it all without spamming the crap out of you.

Wolfram’s rules are a bunch of rules for cellular automata. Hopefully you’re all familiar with Conway’s Game of Life. If not, why are you reading xkcd? The Game of Life is a cellular automaton system with a specific set of rules to describe how each cell reacts based on its neighbors.

Stephen Wolfram (the guy who created Mathematica) established a large set of cellular automata rules, each of which gives you different results based on different neighboring cells. He said that Rule 30 was his favorite (or, at least, so sayeth Wikipedia.)

But, for xkcd’s purposes, rule 34 of the Internet (if it exists, there is porn of it) matched up nicely with the fact that Wolfram had a rule 34 for cellular automata. Now, of course, the challenge falls to the readers: someone must come up with porn involving cellular automata that follow Wolfram’s Rule 34. In other words, rule 35: if there isn’t porn of it, it must be created (see also xkcd’s women in the shower with guitars meme and subsequent website.)

Off with you! To the cellular automaton porn set! Naked cells everywhere! Hide the children!

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Published:
11.17.08 / 9am
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Geeky
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