I'd love to see this with CJK characters.

Is a game of life trivial to iterate a few generations but basically impossible to reverse?

Does that make it a neat option for... Hashing?

I could write a sentence and run it some number of iterations. And it would be easy to verify it.

Firstly, I think it wouldn't be useful when compared to existing algorithms... Cellular automata can be quite heavy to process.

I suspect the problem you will run into this that you cannot reliably say that additional variations will for sure result in significant changes in n ticks of the simulation.

What could be interesting though is Langton's Ant, as you can for sure make guarantees that the next iteration will result in some change in the output - and it should in theory always be entirely reversible if you want it to be. You could easily make it non-reversible by presenting some sub-set of the space for use in verification for example.

this is a really cool idea, and well-executed! only thing Id say is the glyphs end up very bulky, it would be cumbersome to write and readd

Is there a font file I can download

I can offer you this that I quickly lashed up in iFontMaker - https://2ttf.com/94ekn36bAWs

Tempted to have a go at it with MetaFont, actually, since I've been meaning to get around to that since about 1993.

Great, thank you!

If there is, it's well hidden. This page and https://www.geogebra.org/m/xkMPKQnK are all I can find online.

Would be nice to know who originated the idea.

Beautiful.