Comment by Aurelius108

Agreed, I think the key here is that the Game of Life is structured enough that many computational steps can be elided in this way. If it was more chaotic, this couldn't happen. The realization that GoL can be used to run one GoL cell in isolation is the brilliance here I think. Once you can decompose one single cell into GoL, you can also compose GoL into one cell and save computational cycles. Then suddenly it can be GoL all the way down.