Rollercoaster Tycoon wasn’t the most fashionable computer game out there in 1999. But if you took a look beneath the pixels—the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the ...

In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules. Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on ...