Random
If the board is big enough, I don't know that it matters what the chance of any given cell starting alive or dead is.
Sight in Life
I'm not sure if this is possible, but I can imagine a Life Entity that generates and fires radar projectiles which also continuously generate their own projectiles firing back at the entity. (The entity has some kind of membrane that easily absorbs the returning projectiles.) If the radar particle collides with something, it is disrupted and stops sending particles back. The entity is able to observe events in the distance by measuring the lack of returning particles. (Returning particles might also have some kind of interactions with each other that provides additional information)
I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about Life, so I have no idea if this actually is workable. But it's what first occurs to me.
If the board is big enough, I don't know that it matters what the chance of any given cell starting alive or dead is.
What matters isn't just what the local configuration looks like but how well it can expand. Expanding into empty space is easy. Expanding into densely populated space is much tougher.
Re the radar idea. Radar in some sense (and most real world senses for that matter) work because they give information much faster than the environment moves. in the case of real life radar, or vision, this is as fast as the laws of physics allow. Unfortunate...
Conway’s Game of Life is Turing-complete. Therefore, it is possible to create an AI in it. If you created a 3^^3 by 3^^3 Life board, setting the initial state at random, presumably somewhere an AI would be created. Would this AI somehow take over the whole game board, if given enough time?
Would this be visible from the top, as it were?
EDIT: I probably meant 3^^^3, sorry. Also, by generating at random, I meant 50% chance on. But any other chance would work too, I suspect.