[adrianmonk]

Have you heard of the thought experiment where a 2D plane is finitely sized instead of infinitely sized, but as you travel within the 2D plane, if you get to one edge, you wrap around to the opposite edge? Even though its size is finite, you can pick a direction and go that way forever.

If you sit in 3D space and look at this finite 2D plane, then it looks like (say) a rectangle. That's displeasing because from inside the plane, it's continuous, but from the outside, it looks discontinuous.

One way to get rid of that annoyance is to map the plane onto a torus. Then it looks continuous from the outside. It's no longer flat, which is un-plane-like, but you can't have everything in life.

Anyway, the zoom level of game of life is an infinite number line. But what if it repeats and can be represented as something that wraps around? You could think of it as a line segment that you wrap around into a circle (to join the two ends). So the same concept as mapping the plane onto a torus, except 1D instead of 2D.