Why can Conway’s Game of Life be classified as a universal machine?

Question

I was recently reading about artificial life and came across the statement, \"Conway’s Game of Life demonstrates enough complexity to be classified as a universal machine.\"

Answer 1

Conway's "Life" can be taken even further: It's not only possible to build a Life pattern that implements a Universal Turing Machine, but also a Von Neumann "Universal Constructor:" http://conwaylife.com/wiki/Universal_constructor

Since a "Universal Constructor" can be programmed to construct any pattern of cells, including a copy of itself, Coway's "Life" is therefore capable of "self-replication," not just Universal Computation.