No Time to Die, Period

Question

Inside MI6's server farm in the middle of the night, the operator's eyes skittered frantically over an intercepted message:

The development of our new APG code has been coming along nicely; I've signed this message in it. Tomorrow you, under my supervision, will rig the random number generators – both mechanical and electronic – in the Paris casino so that anyone who comes gambling wins and the management will be forced to declare insolvency. Of course we will be reaping the lion's share.
In case you don't know APG code, basically you've got to play a game on your own, of births and deaths of cells specified in each line. The message is in the periods. One limitation is that we can't use S in messages, and until recently we couldn't use W either – but we can always work around.
I wish you the best of luck.
Signed,
2hqz037133zccw6q4wi6zy1oogtozy4bh8
y5ca23zxgg7417z488fnz03ll57zw11
3js46364sj3zhje8ogo8ejhz11x1x11
6m048y4g08k9h1ezw1033xk88034441
32acxca23zy04r4zy04r4zo8a6x6a8o
ggwhlhwggzhah0hhh0hahz11whlhw11
0gwg4c0n9arzoll95m3d45dz6247011
66625ak8zy177xcc0cczy1g8mwiozx91gp
0oggdb8ozca2230o8hf84czy0643032

"By Golly!" Miss Moneypenny exclaimed; she had just arrived in the control room. "Is the last part of the decrypt correct?"

"Yes indeed," came the operator's reply, her voice trembling with a mixture of fear and excitement. "I can give you the details at a more convenient time, but James Bond has a new mission."

"We can talk later. Good night."

Who wrote the message?

Answer 1

Answer:

LE CHIFFRE

Solving:

The "birth and death of cells" makes this a Conway's Game of Life puzzle. APG code can be used to store a particular configuration of cells, some of which have names. Looking up the first line gave me what is known as the "Baker's Dozen". The period of the Baker's Dozen is 12. This gives us the letter "L". Continue solving for the other lines to get the solution. Translating APG into the game and seeing how many turns it takes to start it's "cycle" again is it's period.

Full list:

Baker's Dozen (12), Unnamed (5), 4 Blocks on Star (3), Tumbling T-Tetson (8), Snacker (9), T-Nosed P6 (6), Unnamed (6), P18 Bi-Block Hassler (18), and Unnamed (5)

Answer 2

A partial answer only at this point, I am still working on this and hope to come back to it later!

My suspicion is that this relates to

Conway's Game of Life

More specifically, I think that

the 26 letters and 10 digits in the encoding encode 36 cells in a 6x6 arrangement. I suspect that each row of the signature encodes a starting arrangement (and a few of the subsequent births / deaths of cells) resulting in an oscillator with a different period. For example, an arrangement with period 3 would clue the letter C. I suspect that a starting arrangement with period 19 (S) hasn't been found and the arrangement for period 23 (W) was perhaps only found recently - this is backed up by information here: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Oscillator

I need to do some more digging to find out how the characters would map to the square to make this work out and decode it.

Update: No matter which way out I label the squares (a-z0-9, 0-9a-z, etc) I can't quite make this work. The third line in the code is particularly intriguing:

3js46364sj3zhje8ogo8ejhz11x1x11
consists of three palindromes:
3js46364sj3 / zhje8ogo8ejhz / 11x1x11

Given that cells can't die before they've been born, this seems to imply a set of symmetrical sets of births and deaths, which is unusual.