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I've been running as many of the rules as I can and coming up with brief descriptions of all of them, and I'm also having a hard time coming up with a good standard for classifying a rule as “interesting.”  The more rules I run, the more I realize that many of them do very similar things.  In fact, many of the simpler ones appear to do the exact same thing when running off of a single cell.  The random setups tend to vary more, even if the overall outcome is the same.  Having run so many rules, I am becoming more interested in the relationships between different rules.  I haven’t observed any predictable pattern of numbers of rules that produce similar outcomes yet, which is frustrating.  I feel like there should be some correlation between number and outcome.  An interesting relationship I’ve observed is that some rules produce similar outcomes with inverted colors, such as #6 and #155 or #22 and #129.  I also think it’s interesting when the single setup and the random setup yield noticeably different outcomes, such as #109, or when the result is seemingly random but also symmetrical, like #73.  I think my favorite rule is #122, which begins as a checkered triangle on black and then becomes an alternating series of Sierpinski triangles, because it’s the only one I’ve found that does two sets of different outcomes in one rule.

            A question that I’m wondering about: should we concentrate on the ultimate stable outcome of the rule, or should be also take into account the first few lines?  I’ve found that many rules with similar general outcomes have rather different beginnings, such as #78 and #79 (which are also interesting in that they have similar outcomes and are sequential.)