Yet looking at the picture below, one might suppose that when unlimited growth occurs, the pattern produced must be fairly complicated. But once again code 1329 has a surprise in store. For the facing page shows that when one reaches initial condition 97,439 there is again unlimited growth—but now the pattern that is produced is very simple. And in fact if one were just to see this pattern, one would probably assume that it came from a rule whose typical behavior is vastly simpler than code 1329.

Unbounded growth in code 1329. The initial condition contains a block of 10 cells. The right-hand side of the pattern repeats every 256 steps, and as it moves it leaves behind an infinite sequence of persistent structures.