system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What am I looking at when viewing Conway’s Game of Life? What is the significance of this?

I just found out about this last night and am having difficulty understanding what exactly this is.
gpt
It's a game, a toy, a mathematical toy.

It merely demonstrates that a few very simple rules can generate extremely complex behaviour.  The "rules" for whether an individual cell lives or dies into the next generation are so simple you can do them by hand yourself.

But apply it to a large field of random cells, or a carefully chosen pattern of cells, and you can generate things that appear to wander off into infinity, to last forever, and even generate more things themselves that then wander off into infinity.

If you choose carefully enough, you can make a entire computer inside the game, powered entirely by little things running around based only on those same simple rules of what lives and what dies in the next generation.  An entire computer that could, in theory, perform any calculation that your computer could.

It's an interesting mathematical diversion depicting Turing-completeness, the chaos that arises from simple rules, and it just looks pretty.