Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 2h

Swipe up to try a new variant on Conway's Game of Life. And another. And another. This is how artificial-life researchers spread the joy after the #ALIFE2025 conference! They say it's like TikTok, but I wouldn't know.... ⚙️🧫 rulehunt.org?rulesetHex=7... #cellularautomata #gameoflife

4 11

Reposted by George Musser

Complexity Cat 🐱 @amahury.bsky.social · 1d

Hey #ALIFE2025 people! Have you heard of Assembly Theory? A month ago, I wrote a good, objective essay summarizing AT's contributions, limitations, and possible improvements. It's perfect if you don't want to read all the critiques and counter-critiques that have been written!

Complexity Cat 🐱 @amahury.bsky.social · 28d

As a promising avenue for unifying physics and biology, assembly theory (AT) has been subject of controversy, being both praised and refuted at the same time.

What is its current status? Has it really quantified selection and evolution?/1

#complexitycat🐈‍⬛

amahury.github.io/posts/demyst...

Demystifying Assembly Theory

“It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is … If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there...

amahury.github.io

2 4

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 2d

Tech is depleting not only material resources but also intellectual resources, especially common knowledge. Political polarization erodes agreement on the most basic facts and concepts. "It's almost like seeing the ozone layer deplete before our eyes," said @audreyt.org at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫

8 25

Reposted by George Musser

Hiroki Sayama @hirokisayama.bsky.social · 2d

#ALIFE2025 Day 4 keynote Blaise Agüera y Arcas shows a live demo of his famous Brainfuck experiment (which looks very much like the Matrix)

3 4

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 2d

Evolution has an arrow of time toward greater complexity. It's driven neither by mutation nor by crossover/sex but by symbiogenesis, argued @blaiseaguera.bsky.social (following Lynn Margulis) at #ALIFE2025. He showed lots of cool CoreWar-like competing programs. whatisintelligence.antikythera.org ⚙️🧫

4 11

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 2d

Richard Löffler creates lifelike oil droplets during the public event at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫

2 5 17

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 2d

Another mirroring illusion for your puzzling pleasure, created by @eijiwatanabe.bsky.social, demonstrated by @sinalana.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫

4 12

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 3d

I guess it’s easier to imagine an ensemble of civilizations, for which we can plausibly imagine a selection effect, than of superpower histories on Earth.

1 1

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 3d

Here's a depressing solution to the Fermi Paradox: In a hostile Galaxy, we won't ever see aliens because, if we did, we'd be dead already, mused Georgii Karelin of @oistedu.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. ⚙️🧫

1 2 7

Reposted by George Musser

Complexity Cat 🐱 @amahury.bsky.social · 4d

At the industry session, He Wang (Galbot Robotics) introduced us to a Vision-Language-Action loop to achieve generalist robots. As a solution to the big amount of data needed to train their robots, they propose the use of large scale synthetic data.

#ALIFE2025

4 4

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 4d

The usual explanation for great music is that it's predictable but not too predictable. But there's more to it, said @frosas.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. We prefer music when we perceive agency behind it. Improvisation trumps a prepared performance. See paper at www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy.... ⚙️🧫

5 11

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 4d

Monkeys on typewriters would take eons to generate π, but much MUCH less time to generate a program that would generate π, said @hectorzenil.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. He has a cool applet to prove the point at demonstrations.wolfram.com/InfiniteMonk.... ⚙️🧫

2 8

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 4d

For A.I. to feel empathy, it has to be able to feel pain, argued roboticist Minoru Asada in a provocative talk at #ALIFE2025. He has built a pain signal into his robots. I hope it doesn’t inure them to others’ misery, as we see all too often in people. www.er.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/asadalab/?pa... ⚙️🧫

2 9

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 4d

You might enjoy my extended discussion of Tani's account of consciousness - as a response to prediction error - in my last book!

1 2

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 7d

In this bizarre #opticalillusion, an object seems to switch direction when viewed in a mirror. Mathematician and puzzle-maker Kokichi Sugihara wrote it up for the @euromathsoc.bsky.social magazine at euromathsoc.org/magazine/art... and created a very helpful video at youtu.be/vGxTKpOt6xU?....

1 2 14

Reposted by George Musser

Ethan Siegel @startswithabang.bsky.social · 9d

Thousands of NASA employees to bid farewell to the NASA they knew

Yes, NASA science is being destroyed, and the NASA we know is actively in the process of being gutted.

Here are the receipts.
bigthink.com/starts-with-...
#space #astro #nasa #usa

Thousands of NASA employees to bid farewell to the NASA they knew

As October begins, thousands of longtime NASA employees are leaving the agency. 4000+ will exit by January 9, 2026, changing NASA forever.

bigthink.com

3 30 58

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 11d

Interesting interview of Eliezer Yudkowsky by @kevinroose.com and @caseynewton.bsky.social. One problem I have with A.I. doomsters is that they equate intelligence with power. When I look around at who exerts power and accrues wealth, I see a fairly weak correlation between those two attributes.

Are We Past Peak iPhone? + Eliezer Yudkowsky on A.I. Doom

pca.st

2 8

Reposted by George Musser

Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.bsky.social · 11d

An incredibly important election in a tiny country just went the right way. Moldova has resisted a huge Russian disinformation campaign and will not become a Russian puppet state.

Olga Nesterova @onestpress.onestnetwork.com · 12d

Moldova 🇲🇩 👍

180 1.7K 8.1K

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 13d

For a history project, I need to translate a short passage of handwritten Swedish from the 18th century. Can anyone help?

2 3

Reposted by George Musser

Physics World @physicsworld.bsky.social · 23d

Are we heading for a world in which superhuman AI mathematicians define questions, construct proofs, check them, and then write+peer review the paper about them afterwards? Many mathematicians seem to think so, and some are happier about it than others. ⚛️🧪 #HLF2025 physicsworld.com/a/are-we-hea...

Are we heading for a future of superintelligent AI mathematicians? – Physics World

Some highly intelligent human mathematicians certainly seem to think so, as Margaret Harris reports from the maths-and-computer-science-focused Heidelberg Laureate Forum

physicsworld.com

5 11

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 21d

And now MAGA wants to throw all that away. 😡

Trump’s proposed cut to giant physics experiment could snuff out new form of astronomy

Degrading LIGO’s observations of gravitational waves would amount to “killing a newborn baby,” one astrophysicist says

www.science.org

3 12

Reposted by George Musser

Kyle Cranmer @kylecranmer.bsky.social · 22d

An article in @physicsworld.bsky.social about our panel discussion on AI and the physical sciences at #HLF25. With
@georgemusser.com, Thea Åarrestad, David Silver and Maia Fraser
physicsworld.com/a/the-pros-a...

3 12

George Musser @georgemusser.com · 25d

As if to confirm my feelings of alienation from a world going mad, the German trains booked me onto car 24, but there is no car 24.

1 5

Reposted by George Musser

Quanta Magazine @quantamagazine.bsky.social · Sep 10

The cells of your body follow simple rules and play off one another to form a complete organism. The researcher Alexander Mordvintsev has developed “neural cellular automata,” building blocks that can self-assemble into any form. @georgemusser.com reports: www.quantamagazine.org/self-assembl...

Self-Assembly Gets Automated in Reverse of ‘Game of Life’ | Quanta Magazine

In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules.

www.quantamagazine.org

1 21 43

George Musser @georgemusser.com · Sep 2

Does radiative forcing amount to a change in the effective planetary emissivity?

1