non locality of chance, a pattern in chaos

[AndyJWest]

What you have there, Raaid is (more or less) a one-dimensional cellular automaton. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton) Two dimensional ones are usually more interesting (Conways Life being the classic example for computer nerds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life). Some years back I did a bit of investigation of these myself, including rendomly-generated rules - with the right parameters, you could sometimes get extremely complex behaviour from apparently-simple systems. I'll see if I can get it running again sometime, and show a few screenshots, if it does (some was written in Borlad Delphi under Win 98, and may not run - I know the later Java stuff does. In fact, I may even have it installed on my netbook. Watch this space...

Edit:
Hmmm, I seem to have a problem running the software under Windows on my netbook (grindingly slow) - maybe it'll work better under Ubuntu - or I can run it on the gaming PC. Anyway, for now, Conway's Life running on an 8000 x 8000 grid - order emerges from chaos...