You know one of the hard questions here must be, what configuration exactly is it simulating? It has to be a configuration that simulates the same Game of Life at a higher scale. Any change you make to the configuration must also change the higher level configuration that it simulates.

And it occurs to me, a blank sheet of paper qualifies as the Game Of Life simulating the Game Of Life.

What makes GoL in GoL somewhat magical feeling is less "there are layers of logic being executed" and more "GoL rules and conditions are extremely restrictive yet still just complex enough to simulate nested execution of the ruleset itself". When you move up the complexity chain to "person with a sheet of paper" you lose some of that wonder to just end up with "extremely complex system can throw away most of the complexity to also simulate execution of a simple system" which feels a lot less surprising.

You might like this puzzle.

https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/21

It really makes you think about this; interaction between levels in a simulation.

If you think about it, that's basically what's going on if someone does a quantum mechanics simulation.

Now that you say it like that...

What are other Great Wonders of software?

1. Game of life simulating itself 2. Lisp interpreter (in C? or in Lisp) 3. a game engine?? 4. Bitcoin 5. Other distributed systems?? (Spanner?) 6. AI/deep learning representative. GPT4? AlphaGo? Pikadditions? 7. ?

- Error correcting codes (viterbi, reed/Solomon, ...)

- cryptography in general

- data compression

- a lot of DSP stuff is pretty magical in it's various applications - digital filtering, modulation/demodulation, recovery of weak signals in noisy environments, beam-forming etc

There's a lot of really amazing, largely mathematical, foundation work that we now tend to take for granted and without which we'd be back in the relative dark ages.