In the examples shown, the cellular automata being emulated have 8 cases in their rules, with each case giving the outcome for one of the 8 possible combinations of colors of a cell and its immediate neighbors. In every block of 20 cells in the universal cellular automaton, these rules are encoded in a very straightforward way, by listing in order the outcomes for each of the 8 possible cases.

To update the color of the cell represented by a particular block, what the universal cellular automaton must then do is to determine which of the 8 cases applies to that cell. And it does this by successively eliminating cases that do not apply, until eventually only one case remains. This process of elimination can be seen quite directly in the pictures on the previous pages [649, 650, 651]. Below each large black or white triangle, there are initially 8 vertical dark lines. Each of these lines corresponds to one of the 8 cases in the rule, and the system is set up so that a particular line ends as soon as the case to which it corresponds has been eliminated.

It so happens that in the universal cellular automaton discussed here the elimination process for a given cell always occurs in the block immediately to the left of the one that represents that cell. But the process itself is not too difficult to understand, and indeed it works in much the way one might expect of a practical electronic logic circuit.

There are three basic stages, visible in the pictures as three stripes moving to the left across each block. The first stripe carries the color of the left-hand neighbor, and causes all cases in the rule where that neighbor does not have the appropriate color to be eliminated. The next two stripes then carry the color of the cell itself and of its right-hand neighbor. And after all three stripes have passed, only one of the 8 cases ever survives, and this case is then the one that gives the new color for the cell.

The pictures on the last few pages have shown how the universal cellular automaton can in effect be programmed to emulate any cellular automaton whose rules involve nearest neighbors and two possible colors for each cell. But the universal cellular automaton is in no way restricted to emulating only rules that involve nearest neighbors. And thus on the facing page, for example, it is shown emulating a rule that involves next-nearest as well as nearest neighbors.