This is a genuinely fantastic concept and you executed it with style! I think often maths-derived concepts like these are very difficult to turn into a recognizably fun gameplay experience but the way it was done here I think was really good. I could see it being a full game with additional mechanics like creating/removing some number of cells manually to influence the patterns, or even adding cells that follow other Cellular Automata rules aside from Game of Life (such as wireworld or langton's ant).