Bret Beheim
@babeheim.bsky.social
2.8K followers 2.4K following 240 posts
cultural evolution, behavioral ecology, math models, data provenance, MOSAIC group leader @ Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology + faculty at the Leipzig School of Human Origins https://babeheim.com/
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Reposted by Bret Beheim
gremlin.world
I will never not repost this

(Sound on for maximum effect)
Reposted by Bret Beheim
govpritzker.illinois.gov
"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that."

Looking forward to seeing Jimmy back on the air.
Jimmy Kimmel Returns: ABC Ends Suspension Starting Tuesday
Jimmy Kimmel will return to late night on Tuesday
variety.com
Reposted by Bret Beheim
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Look at academia giving me a little hope
Reposted by Bret Beheim
khakhalin.bsky.social
When the labels for a bunch of abstracted trees (opening moves in Go!!) are already bridging fantasy and scifi genres:
Early Modern Era
Imperial Era
International Era
Internet Era
Superhuman AI Era
a round abstract tree for Early Modern Era A matching tree for Internet era
Reposted by Bret Beheim
sobchuk.bsky.social
Cool new paper (and a thread about it) by @babeheim.bsky.social on the cultural evolution of Go games! Check out these colourful decision trees 🔥 doi.org/10.1017/ehs....
babeheim.bsky.social
Consistent with other recent work in cultural evolution, there's also strong evidence of an inverse-U relationship between player community size and behavioral diversity. The most diverse era in the game was characterized by many small groups, versus the modern game.
babeheim.bsky.social
In short, it seems like centuries of collective, cumulative innovation has done pretty well, all things considered. Humans can't play as good as AI but AI seem to have rediscovered much of the human strategic repertoire.
babeheim.bsky.social
AI has introduced a lot of new moves into the game tree and defied a lot of conventional wisdom, but overall the families of strategies have only changed incrementally post-AlphaGo.
babeheim.bsky.social
Even though superhuman Go AI like AlphaGo have led to a measurable increase in innovation, player skill and move diversity, in the full context of historical time, the disruptiveness of AI has so far been pretty minor!
babeheim.bsky.social
I remember when AlphaGo first appeared and beat Lee Sedol, wondering if AI was going to show us we've been playing the game wrong this whole time....
babeheim.bsky.social
Zooming in, it's clear the tempo of evolutionary change has increased since the arrival of the internet, with faster turnover and lower strategic diversity.
babeheim.bsky.social
The diversity of opening moves ebbs and flows with world events; industrialization, revolution and the arrival of the internet all have measurable impacts on the information ecology and strategic repertoires of high-level players
babeheim.bsky.social
Using sequence alignment algorithms on historical game records, we can identify families of opening strategies, and track how they rise and fall in popularity over the centuries. Here are the most common opening sequences as a decision tree, from the 1600s up until World War II.
babeheim.bsky.social
How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go!

400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!
Miyagawa Shuntei's 1898 painting, "Playing Go (Japanese Chess)"
Reposted by Bret Beheim
twaring.bsky.social
🚨 Excited to share a new paper 📃, years in the making, with Zach Wood.

We propose that human evolution is characterized as an Evolutionary Transition in Inheritance and Individuality (ETII).

Explainer and OA paper below:
babeheim.bsky.social
last update: 48 years ago lol
Reposted by Bret Beheim
svalver.bsky.social
What do Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Mortal Kombat have to teach us about #cultural #evolution? As a social-technological phenomenon, #arcade game genres evolved like cultural species—some diversified, while others became "living fossils." 🕹️🧪 👉 doi.org/10.1017/ehs....
babeheim.bsky.social
Your restraint is a model for us all 😅

Incidentally, this paper largely wouldn't exist without your Current Biology paper on sequence alignment algorithms, which is a huge advance for cultural evolution. Getting to this MDS plot suddenly made a lot of stuff make sense in Go.
Reposted by Bret Beheim
thebethocracy.bsky.social
I have always loved linguistics, coming from Baltimore. This is awesome. I follow a bunch of linguistics and language people on TikTok, but my children have been watching it with me off and on and well, things have gotten a bit weird for me there.
couts.bsky.social
OSINT folks, the bar has been raised
Reposted by Bret Beheim
jsmartin.bsky.social
I'm very excited to share the central paper from my PhD out now in Science Advances. We investigated how social effects among neighbors shape the evolution of reproductive cooperation and the pace of adaptive population growth among the Indigenous Tsimane of Bolivia.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Indirect genetic effects among neighbors promote cooperation and accelerate adaptation in a small-scale human society
Social effects on fertility promote population growth and the evolution of flexible cooperation in a small-scale human society.
www.science.org
babeheim.bsky.social
oh man wait till u find out about our gofundme healthcare system
babeheim.bsky.social
Yes, that's right, this one: