Three Rule 30 center-column prizes remain unsolved after seven years
What happened
On October 1, 2019, Stephen Wolfram posed three prize questions about the center column of the Rule 30 cellular automaton, with a total of $30,000 on offer. Rule 30 starts from a single black cell and generates rows by the 00011110 rule, producing regular stripes on the left and a right side that never settles. As of an October 23, 2026 report, seven years on, all three questions remain open. The center column has been computed for a billion cells and passes standard randomness tests, but no one can prove whether it is non-periodic, whether the two colors appear equally often, or whether computing the nth cell takes at least n steps.
Written by AI from the coverage · updated 1 hour ago
Coverage
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- Hacker News front pageRule 30: one black cell
Stephen Wolfram 于 2019 年 10 月 1 日为 Rule 30 中心列设下总额 3 万美元的三个悬赏问题，七年过去三个问题全部仍未解决。Rule 30 由 00011110 这一条规则逐行生成，左侧呈规则条纹、右侧永不收敛，中心列已计算十亿个格子并通过标准随机性检验，但无法证明其是否非周期、两色是否等频、第 n 个格子是否至少需 n 步计算。
Heat over time
Not enough continuous observations to draw a trend yet.