My strong expectation is that in Life, there is no configuration that you can put in the starting area that is robust against randomly initializing the larger area.
There are very likely other cellular automata which do support arbitrary computation, but which are much less fragile versus evolution of randomly initialized spaces nearby.
My strong expectation is that in Life, there is no configuration that you can put in the starting area that is robust against randomly initializing the larger area.
There are very likely other cellular automata which do support arbitrary computation, but which are much less fragile versus evolution of randomly initialized spaces nearby.