So I only dabble, but what was surprising for me with GoL on a small grid was how the performance wasn't great even if I'd shown the network almost every possib

So I only dabble, but what was surprising for me with GoL on a small grid was how the performance wasn't great even if I'd shown the network almost every possible state during training (omitting a test set). Nets do such amazing things with open ended recognition problems ("what is in this picture") that you sort of just expect them to trivially learn closed form solutions perfectly. I know this is a fallacy, but that is where the surprise came for me.