Cloudinary Blog

Cellular Automata are pretty cool things to play with. There are many, many variants, like Conway’s Game of Life, Abelian Sandpiles, Langton’s Loops and Brian’s Brain, but in this blogpost, I’ll just talk about the simplest kinds of cellular automata: one-dimensional cellular automata.

In part one (One pixel is worth three thousand words) of this turned-to-be-two-part blog post, I discussed one-pixel images and how well different image formats “compress” these images. I was surprised how much there is to be said about the matter. This was supposed to be a short blog post, describing one-pixel images and how they compress, and instead it became a glorious monster (and also a two part blog post…).

A couple of months ago while taking a break from implementing cool new features like q_auto and g_auto, I was joking in our team chat about how well various image formats “compress” one-pixel images. In response, Orly — who runs the blog — asked me if I’d write a post about single-pixel images. I said: "Sure, why not. But it will be a very short blog post. After all, there’s not much you can say about a single pixel."