Structure and computability of preimages in the Game of Life

Abstract: Conway's Game of Life is a two-dimensional cellular automaton. As a dynamical system, it is well-known to be computationally universal, i.e.\ capable of simulating an arbitrary Turing machine. We show that in a sense taking a single backwards step of the Game of Life is a computationally universal process, by constructing patterns whose preimage computation encodes an arbitrary circuit-satisfaction problem, or, equivalently, any tiling problem. As a corollary, we obtain for example that the set of orphans is coNP-complete, exhibit a $6210 \times 37800$-periodic configuration whose preimage is nonempty but contains no periodic configurations, and prove that the existence of a preimage for a periodic point is undecidable. Our constructions were obtained by a combination of computer searches and manual design.