It's probably worth pointing out that Conway's Life is not only Turing universal but that it can host self-replicating machines. In other words, an infinite randomly initialized Life board will contain "living creatures" which will multiply and grow, and ultimately come to dominate the entire board, as the self-replicating molecules in Earth's primeval oceans gave rise to biological life, which drastically changed the character of the whole planet.
In other words, the large-scale character of *any* sufficiently large Life board will be determined by the properties of the self-replicating patterns (which are a rare class (to begin with!), and overlap the Turing-universal ones). It remains to be seen whether replicating Life patterns could evolve to become intelligent. Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=50889022-004e1e
