But isn’t a “cell” composed of infinitely many cells on infinitely many levels? So changing a “cell” should change all cells on all lower levels, not just the visible level.
Sure, lower levels will change, but instead of the chaos above they’ll just continue to simulate upper levels in perfect order (even if different).
Edit: putting some effort to be more precise (though I may be on the wrong track): since the period of the pattern is 35328, it depends at which tick we introduce the change. Since we're changing a cell at a certain level N it makes sense to consider tick 1 out of 35328 for level N-1 (zooming in).
If we introduce a change at any other tick (out of the 35328), what we are really doing is a big change in level N-1 rather than a single cell change in level N.
I dont think thats correct. Any change on a lower level will effect the greater cell.
Each cells behavior is the composition of all its lower cells after all.
Im sure there are various compositions that lead to the same outcome, so it should be possible for each cell to be something else, but most changes would change the greater cell. For an easy example image a cell turned from on to off at 2x slower than normal.
Edit: putting some effort to be more precise (though I may be on the wrong track): since the period of the pattern is 35328, it depends at which tick we introduce the change. Since we're changing a cell at a certain level N it makes sense to consider tick 1 out of 35328 for level N-1 (zooming in).
If we introduce a change at any other tick (out of the 35328), what we are really doing is a big change in level N-1 rather than a single cell change in level N.