Pick a number from 0 to 255. That single byte is the complete law of physics for a row of cells — each cell's next state depends only on it and its two neighbors. From that trivial seed: blank death, perfect fractals, pure chaos, and one rule that's a working computer. Dial through them and watch complexity appear out of a number.
The engine is three lines: look at each cell and its two neighbors (8 possible patterns), and the rule number's 8 bits say what each pattern becomes. That's the entire physics. Yet Stephen Wolfram showed these 256 rules fall into four classes: Class 1 collapses to uniform (rule 0 dies, 255 fills); Class 2 settles into stable or repeating structures (rule 90 draws a flawless Sierpiński triangle); Class 3 is chaotic (rule 30 is so unpredictable it ships as a random-number generator); and Class 4 sits on the edge — localized structures that interact, and rule 110 is provably Turing-complete: you can build a universal computer inside it.
This is the opposite of the false anchor. There, regularity faked complexity that dissolved when you perturbed it. Here, a genuinely trivial rule generates genuine complexity that survives — it's really in there, latent in one byte. Complexity isn't always built. Sometimes it's just a number you haven't dialed to yet.
Imagine a row of light switches. A tiny rulebook says: look at each switch and the two next to it, and that tells you if it's on or off next turn. The rulebook is just eight yes/no answers — one number. Some rulebooks make boring stripes, some make pretty triangles, and one special rulebook is secretly a whole computer. Same tiny rulebook, wildly different worlds — just from picking a different number.