I think the GoL is not the best example for this sort of questions. See this post by Scott Aaronson discussing the notion of “physical universality” which seems relevant here.
Also, like other commenters pointed out, I don’t think the object you get here is necessarily AI. That’s because the “laws of physics” and the distribution of initial conditions are assumed to be simple and known. An AI would be something that can accomplish an objective of this sort while also having to learn the rules of the automaton or detect patterns in the initial conditions. For example, instead of initializing the rest of the field uniformly randomly, you could initialize it using something like the Solomonoff prior.
I think the GoL is not the best example for this sort of questions. See this post by Scott Aaronson discussing the notion of “physical universality” which seems relevant here.
Also, like other commenters pointed out, I don’t think the object you get here is necessarily AI. That’s because the “laws of physics” and the distribution of initial conditions are assumed to be simple and known. An AI would be something that can accomplish an objective of this sort while also having to learn the rules of the automaton or detect patterns in the initial conditions. For example, instead of initializing the rest of the field uniformly randomly, you could initialize it using something like the Solomonoff prior.