Wolfram was astonished by the complexity in the results of rule set 30, and I have to agree with his sense of surprise. This is not the relatively trivial complexity of rule set 90 with its nested triangles. The left-hand side has a certain amount of regularity but the center and right-hand side produce a totally unpredictable pattern, which according to Wolfram (who has had the time and the patience to check these things) does not repeat for at least one million cycles.

That such a simple set of rules can lead to this degree of variety is totally counter-intuitive. Remember, the rules can be completely stated in 8 bits, and yet the results appear to contain a vast amount of information.

But that wasn't the only surprise. Rule set 110 produces a different kind of complexity.