I've often thought of that, a compression thing that says "start with this small board state, run for so many generations, go sample this area of the board, and maybe apply this run-length-encoded binary patch" but computing that initial state is, uhhhhh, a lot. A huge amount. Too freaky. But maybe there's a cellular automaton that is easier to run in reverse to find such a thing? This becomes a question for the real computer scientists.