The level you change the cell in will be destroyed by a wave of chaos radiating outward from the original damage, leaving boring 'ash' patterns in its wake.

The levels below that one will be unaffected, faithfully simulating the chaos happening above them using their unbroken technology.

The levels above that one will no longer be simulating the Game of Life. The broken part of the levels below will appear as a faded spot, neither white nor black, growing forever but exponentially slower each level you go up.

But isn’t a “cell” composed of infinitely many cells on infinitely many levels? So changing a “cell” should change all cells on all lower levels, not just the visible level.

Sure, lower levels will change, but instead of the chaos above they’ll just continue to simulate upper levels in perfect order (even if different).

Edit: putting some effort to be more precise (though I may be on the wrong track): since the period of the pattern is 35328, it depends at which tick we introduce the change. Since we're changing a cell at a certain level N it makes sense to consider tick 1 out of 35328 for level N-1 (zooming in).

If we introduce a change at any other tick (out of the 35328), what we are really doing is a big change in level N-1 rather than a single cell change in level N.

I dont think thats correct. Any change on a lower level will effect the greater cell.

Each cells behavior is the composition of all its lower cells after all.

Im sure there are various compositions that lead to the same outcome, so it should be possible for each cell to be something else, but most changes would change the greater cell. For an easy example image a cell turned from on to off at 2x slower than normal.

Reminds me of false vacuum decay.

> What happens if we artificially change the value for a cell? I imagine it would ensure chaos and the changes would eventually propagate to every level. Would love to see this.

Is this analogous to cancer? Would be interesting to see it develop and even if any ‘correction’ or ‘immune system’ type effects happens.

I suppose in a sense it would. Would be really interesting to explore that with different input values and see what happens. I imagine some changes would result in the whole thing eventually collapsing and others would maybe get self corrected. My guess is a any single change would collapse it either entirely or at least break the simulation of the game of life, while two changes might self correct each other.

I also wonder what happens if we make changes not just to the initial configuration but at different iterations. After iteration 2, change x. It'd be like interweaving functions.

Hmm really getting curious about trying this out myself.

I don’t think a change with effects rippling out would be a cancer.

Cancer self-replicates whereas this would simply be either fast catastrophic failure for all levels above, or a change whose effect got suppressed (either died out, or maintained but doesn’t change next level behavior) and only had limited temporary impact.

I think he meant it in the sense that its a mutation that propagates indefinitely. But yeah its a loose analogy.

Why would you expect corrective effects to occur?