1. What happens if we artificially change the value for a cell? I imagine it would ensue chaos and the changes would eventually propagate to every level. Would love to see this.
2. Would it be possible to have each cell be a different stimulation while still acting as Conways Game of Life in a greater zoom. I imagine yes, so long as the simulation respects its boundaries and turns on and off at the correct times. I wonder what limits there are to this.
The levels below that one will be unaffected, faithfully simulating the chaos happening above them using their unbroken technology.
The levels above that one will no longer be simulating the Game of Life. The broken part of the levels below will appear as a faded spot, neither white nor black, growing forever but exponentially slower each level you go up.
Edit: putting some effort to be more precise (though I may be on the wrong track): since the period of the pattern is 35328, it depends at which tick we introduce the change. Since we're changing a cell at a certain level N it makes sense to consider tick 1 out of 35328 for level N-1 (zooming in).
If we introduce a change at any other tick (out of the 35328), what we are really doing is a big change in level N-1 rather than a single cell change in level N.
Each cells behavior is the composition of all its lower cells after all.
Im sure there are various compositions that lead to the same outcome, so it should be possible for each cell to be something else, but most changes would change the greater cell. For an easy example image a cell turned from on to off at 2x slower than normal.
Is this analogous to cancer? Would be interesting to see it develop and even if any ‘correction’ or ‘immune system’ type effects happens.
I also wonder what happens if we make changes not just to the initial configuration but at different iterations. After iteration 2, change x. It'd be like interweaving functions.
Hmm really getting curious about trying this out myself.
Cancer self-replicates whereas this would simply be either fast catastrophic failure for all levels above, or a change whose effect got suppressed (either died out, or maintained but doesn’t change next level behavior) and only had limited temporary impact.