Depending on how many elements you have :)

Good question! The number could be arbitrarily high in theory, in practice I doubt the number will leave the two-digit range¹. (In case anyone's wondering, BTW, this is related to multistate cellular automata; w is a neighborhood count, and the list I mentioned is a list of (some) states of the CA in question.)

I'll have to take a long look at your code to really understand it, but wow, those timings look marvellous. Thank you! If this ends up working out I'll definitely owe you a beer.

Footnotes:

1. Edited to add: in fact, since the amount of data generated will increase exponentially with the number of CA states, I think realistically, it won't even leave the single-digit range.