An elementary cellular automaton rule is specified by 8 bits, and all elementary cellular automaton rules can be considered to sit on the vertices of the 8-dimensional unit hypercube. This unit hypercube is the cellular automaton rule space. For next-nearest-neighbor cellular automata, a rule is specified by 25 = 32 bits, and the cellular automaton rule space is a 32-dimensional unit hypercube. A distance between two rules can be defined by the number of steps required to move from one vertex, which represents the first rule, and another vertex, representing another rule, along the edge of the hypercube. This rule-to-rule distance is also called the Hamming distance.