 Like any other CA, Life can be considered a computational device: an initial configuration of the automaton can encode an input string. One can let the system run and, at some point, read the current configuration as the result of the computation performed so far, decoding it into an output string. But exactly what can Life compute? It turns out that Life can compute everything a universal Turing machine can and therefore, taking on board Turing’s Thesis, function as a general purpose computer: a suitable selection of initial conditions can ensure that the system carry out arbitrary algorithmic procedures. 