Comment Semantics (Score 1) 248
It depends what you mean by "complexity". Sure Conway's game of life seems like a set of simple rules but so does the axiomization of the natural numbers, see the Peano Axioms. Despite being "simple" it still leads to Godel's incompleteness theorem.
I would image the "complexity" of Conway's Game of life is more complex than you would think. I'm not even sure we could define the game as "simple" to begin with.