Enter ``return'' is entered at #22 to select a single basin. The network must first be run forward from the initial seed to find the attractor. States at each successive step are held in a temporary memory and checked for a repeat with each new state. A repeat would define the attractor cycle. It is possible to limit the number of steps memorised and checked from the initial seed. This may be useful for some rules (such as k=3, (dec) rules 60,150) which are known to have long attractor cycles with no transients, or just short transients. The default maximum number of steps to be memorised is 10,000, but this can be amended. If zero is set, the network will iterate forwards only, and the forward only prompts will be activated (see #24).
If the dynamics is interrupted (with ``q``) while the network is still iterating forward looking for the attractor cycle, the following prompt is presented,
still looking for attractor cycle, 4379 iterations (values shown are examples)
exit-q, cont-ret: