What’s not clear to me is if it is non trivial to (a)create a GOL NN that models the game cells directly as neurons (which would seem to be an efficient and eff

What’s not clear to me is if it is non trivial to (a)create a GOL NN that models the game cells directly as neurons (which would seem to be an efficient and effective method) or if it’s just (b) nontrivial to create a transformer architecture model that can model the game state n-turns in the future. I would be very surprised if (a) was not effective, but that (b) is difficult is not surprising, since that is a very nontrivial task that requires intermediary modelling tools to perform for humans (arguably the most advanced NN that we have access to at the moment) (a) is actually a form of (b) in the form of a modelling tool.