Yeah that's the problem with unconstrained things: http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25

(Ok-ok, I know it is just a fun comment, but just to be serious anyway for the sake of truth:

you can think of how likely that this is a GoL pattern: take the set of all imaginable GoL patterns, at all timestep, and check how frequent is this subpattern then, compared to some combination of some common/well-know patterns, like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Exampl... )