The right hand side of the rule table, the one that corresponds to state 1 in plane 0, can be filled out in many ways; all the entries determine whether a cell will continue to age, retaining its infectious property, or recover. As with the left hand side, the recovery can be made to depend upon the number of activated neighbors. Note that this particular programming of the CAM does not allow cells to be non-infectious and simultaneously non-infecting; a zero cell always resets the counter, leaving no way to determine its age.
In the classical rule there are three states: quiescent, infectious, passive, whose sequence is followed cyclically. The process is initiated once an infectious cell stands next to a quiescent neighbor.
Another interesting variant is to fill the tables with 1's; then place a zero in the 0 live-neighbor, 0 age position of the activation table, and a diagonal of zeroes in the recovery table. Option i performs the first part.