Cool and all that, but isn't this... practically and intellectually useless? Surely, you can build a computer using pebbles on the sea shore by aligning them in the specific order. How is that surprising?
I would counter your question by asking, isn't your comment here practically and intellectually useless?
We need more than that.
We need breathing, pissing, shitting, fighting, and sex.
We do not know how ‘soup of chemistry’ does information processing. (e.g. biology)
The more it looks like soup, the more we might be able to intuit how to tackle things that are unbounded in complexity. E.g. how do millions of cells coordinate growth to make a new organ/repair and then stop, what are the chemical initial conditions that generate this complex orchestra, what tells it to stop, can we speak that language if we knew it?
With computer in GOL you have GOL which will do the pattern transformations.
If you say it's not pebbles then imagine a mechanical computer built out of them. Provide some kinetic energy and rocks begin to compute just as the silicon in your computer begins to compute when you put electrical energy into it.
For any passerbys