I was recently reading about artificial life and came across the statement, "Conway’s Game of Life demonstrates enough complexity to be classified as a universal machine." I only had a rough understanding of what a universal machine is, and Wikipedia only brought me as close to understanding as Wikipedia ever does. I wonder if anyone could shed some light on this very sexy statement?
Conway's Game of Life seems, to me, to be a lovely distraction with some tremendous implications: I can't make the leap between that and calculator? Is that even the leap that I should be making?
You can build a Turing machine out of Conway's life - although it would be pretty horrendous.
The key is in gliders (and related patterns) - these move (slowly) along the playing field, so can represent streams of bits (the presence of a glider for a 1 and the absence for a 0). Other patterns can be built to take in two streams of gliders (at right angles) and emit another stream of bits corresponding to the AND/OR/etc of the original two streams.
EDIT: There's more on this on the LogiCell web site.