OTOH ... whatever the initial condition is, sooner or later we will have a cycle. We always have a cycle in the GoL, eventually. Might be very trivial, an empty table. Might be a longer, complex cycle, but that is the way which always happens, sooner or later in the Game of Life.
We may stare at the empty plane and ask ourselves if this is the graveyard of a superintelligence, once lived here and conquered the plane for a brief time, then vanished in a collapse. Several gliders and roses could be everything what remained, as some dry fossils.
Everything is uniquely defined by the initial pattern.
oops, u meant deterministically. sry for glancing that sentence without context
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.