I suppose in a sense it would. Would be really interesting to explore that with different input values and see what happens. I imagine some changes would result in the whole thing eventually collapsing and others would maybe get self corrected. My guess is a any single change would collapse it either entirely or at least break the simulation of the game of life, while two changes might self correct each other.

I also wonder what happens if we make changes not just to the initial configuration but at different iterations. After iteration 2, change x. It'd be like interweaving functions.

Hmm really getting curious about trying this out myself.