Universality under the chosen Game of Life interface

Determine whether the fixed input encoding, output decoding, and equilibrium-based halting condition used by the Game-of-Life Emergent Model preserve computational universality.

Background

Conway’s Game of Life is universal under suitable constructions, but the experimental GoL-EM uses a restricted program representation based on glider placements, positional block encoding, a positional decoder, and fixed-point halting. The authors explicitly state that it is unknown whether this particular interface and halting protocol retain the universality of the underlying cellular automaton.

References

Several limitations remain. First, although GoL itself is universal under proper constructions (such as Rendell's \citep{rendell2016turing}), it is unknown whether the interface and halting condition chosen here preserve universality.

— Emergent Models: Intelligence from Tiny Substrates  (2608.14019 - Bocchese et al., 14 Aug 2026) in Section 3.2, “GoL-EM,” Results discussion