Backwards game of life? How hard can it be? Well... https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8pjrVbdafY

Yes we do control much more complex systems and optimize much more complex objectives than just a target arrangement of pixels. It is an optimization problem that people were trying to solve with heuristics. Leetcode style.

Of course it was hard if not impossible. And of course even a suboptimal neural network can do it easily.