Interesting. But doesn't answer any real questions. For--where did the engineer come from?

Outside? I mean, from the cellular automata's perspective we are outside of their universe.

Maybe the so called architect (or god as you prefer) that some people like to talk so much is actually outside space/time. He just doesn't affect us (besides the original seeding or big bang) like these people say.

Of course, if we go that way we might end up with a discussion about the matrix, what is reality and so on...

The First Cause? The Unmoved Mover?

One might as well refuse to give answer instead.

Negative.

That reminds of Greg Egan's Permutation City. The latter half of the book focuses on intelligent simulations created from cellular automata, and the implications of such.

Greg Egan writes some seriously mindblowing stuff. Another good one to check out is Bios, which has quantum computing super DNA, that pre-emptively adapts to the environment by picking the best DNA from parallel universes.

I love that book, I was thinking about it too when I read this article.