Universal Computation in the Game of Life

Note that in this construction, space and time resources are considered unbounded. The goal was not to construct a efficient computer in Life, or even one that could be practically implemented, but simply to show that in principle Life can compute anything that is computable. This also shows that even CAs (such as Life) with very simple transition rules can be inherently unpredictable—because of Life s universality, there is no general procedure that can predict, say, when an initial configuration will fade away into the all Os configuration. 

In general, universal computation in CAs is interesting only as a proof of principle 

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