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.
Or, we could find that the playing field stabilizes to something that can easily be interpreted as a superintelligence's preferred state - perhaps with the field divided into subsections in which interesting things happen in repeated cycles, or whatever.
I wonder why rational consequentialist agent should do anything but channel all available resources into instrumental goal of finding a way to circumvent heat death. Mixed strategies are obviously suboptimal as expected utility of heat death circumvention is infinite.
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.