This is fascinating. It's not about neural networks struggling with the game of life. It is much more subtle than that. It's that the training algorithms are

This is fascinating. It's not about neural networks struggling with the game of life. It is much more subtle than that. It's that the training algorithms are not able to reach the optimal network even if such network has already been found by hand. But, it's also a great opportunity. The Game of Life is a simple enough algorithm that we can use it to fine tune NN training algorithms until they can start training with much better initial values for the weights.