A healthy cell is currently not catalyzing a reaction, but can become infected depending upon the number of neighboring infected and ill cells.
Infected cells are in the process of catalyzing a reaction.
The degree of infection increases, until the cell is ill. Ill cells have just completed their reaction and become healthy on the next time step. This version of the hodgepodge machine uses 99 levels of infection. The value of the state field is used for display, and thus represents the status of the catalyst.