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Reposted by Erwan Plantec

ALICE Workshop @aliceworkshop.org · 16d

We are excited to announce the Artificial Life, Intelligence, Complexity & Evolution (𝗔𝗟𝗜𝗖𝗘) workshop. This first edition will be hosted in Copenhagen on the first week of February.

We will soon be announcing the guest speakers—Stay tuned!

Check our website for more information: aliceworkshop.org

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katja heuer @k4tj4.bsky.social · Jul 27

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To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social · Jul 4

How do ant colonies perform computations? What kind of dynamical state allows them to do it? It has already been 30 years since my colleague, Octavio Miramontes, and I suggested that they, as liquid neural networks, might exploit critical states. Check: hal.elte.hu/~vicsek/down...

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Dirk Gütlin @gutlin.bsky.social · Jun 26

I don't know why, I just love these cell simulations :)

Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

Synthetic ecosystems that autonomously and continuously evolve in silico 👾
An Alifer dream we pursue with Flow-Lenia, a mass-conservative continuous CA !
If you are interested in complex systems with (1) emergent creatures and (2) intrinsic evolutionary dynamics, go check our new paper !
A 🧵

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Clément Moulin-Frier @clemmoulinfrier.bsky.social · Jun 26

Extended Flow-Lenia paper is out in the ALife journal, with more experiments and insights! See 🧵 from 1st-author
@eplantec.bsky.social for a summary.

For a full overview of our research in Artificial Life, here is a talk I gave at the Demeco workshop at EPFL
:
youtube.com/watch?v=YYFr...

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Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

With @hamongautier.bsky.social , Mayelen Etcheverry, @bertchakovsky.bsky.social , @pyoudeyer.bsky.social and @clemmoulinfrier.bsky.social
Go check our paper for more !
📄 doi.org/10.1162/artl...
📄 www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.08569

Flow-Lenia: Emergent Evolutionary Dynamics in Mass Conservative Continuous Cellular Automata

doi.org

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Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

And the optimization of the simulation parameters towards desired objectives, e.g creatures sensing and climbing gradients :

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Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

This work also recapitulates previous results with the Flow-Lenia system Like the discovery of complex emergent creatures form random search only:

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Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

While we observe evolutionary dynamics in the system they still tend to settle and produce bounded complexity.
The quest for open-ended dynamics is then still on ! In your opinion what is lacking now for more complexity to evolve ?

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Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

1. A dissipative environment with constant in- and out-flows of matter(=energy)
2. An environment where creatures need to consume, and compete for, external resources in order to counter their inevitable dissipation.

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Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

What if we could then engineer synthetic ecosystems to test our theories on the emergence of life and the evolution of complexity ?
That’s what we propose by designing 2 additional environments within FL and measure their effects on the long-term behaviour of the system:

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Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

We use these metrics to evaluate the evolutionary dynamics e$merging from Flow-Lenia local rules in different conditions and also visualise emerging evolutionary trees:

Evolutionary trees extracted from Flow-Lenia simulations. Color code for time (form purple to red) while xyz-axes are the 3 first principal components of variation of the parameters

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Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

We go larger scales in this work by simulating larger environments for longer ! We then use evolutionary activity metrics (see tinyurl.com/3chv37m9), a framework designed to analyse systems that evolve under intrinsic fitnesses, to evaluate the long-term evolutionary dynamics

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Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

FL allows to embed the CA parameters within its dynamics, making them localised, just like genomes ! This makes FL a unique system to simulate multi-species environments where rules can compete for mass, spread and undergo mutations: all the ingredients for evolution to emerge !

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Erwan Plantec @eplantec.bsky.social · Jun 24

Synthetic ecosystems that autonomously and continuously evolve in silico 👾
An Alifer dream we pursue with Flow-Lenia, a mass-conservative continuous CA !
If you are interested in complex systems with (1) emergent creatures and (2) intrinsic evolutionary dynamics, go check our new paper !
A 🧵

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Reposted by Erwan Plantec

Kiabugboy @kiabugboy.bsky.social · May 26

New video on the recently discovered Mosura is up on my channel!
#paleoart #mosura #3DAnimation #SciArt
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynHJ...

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Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social · May 8

Two types of brains have emerged in nature: solid (ours) and liquid (ant colonies, immune system). What can be computed by liquid brains? How complex are they? Check our paper on the statistical physics of liquid brains @jordipinero.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

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Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social · Apr 28

How can biological systems anticipate future events? In our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social, we show how a simple genetic circuit can predict future trends through a simple (and perhaps widespread) mechanism @drmichaellevin.bsky.social @koseskalab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Mike Levin @drmichaellevin.bsky.social · Apr 20

Ever wonder what a neural network would look like in a novel organism w/o selection for specific structure and function? New #preprint with morphological, behavioral, electrophysiological, and transcriptomic analysis of a new kind of Xenobot with a nervous system:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Elias Najarro @najarro.science · Mar 31

Announcing SONI: Self-Organising Neural Intelligence(s) 🧠

An #ALife2025 special session to bring together AI & ALife communities to explore how self-organisation can contribute to neural paradigms of intelligence.

Call for papers sites.google.com/view/soni-al... |Submission deadline: May 4th

Self-Organising Neural Intelligence(s)

Important dates: Submission Deadline: May 4th, 2025 Author Notification: TBA

sites.google.com

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

Today #complexitycat kicks off its Interview column featuring one of the most iconic researchers in #ArtificialLife: @hirokisayama.bsky.social.

What are the most important challenges for this field? Can we really achieve open-ended evolution? This and more here.🐈‍⬛👇
amahury.github.io/posts/interv...

The Art of Making Things Evolve

For decades Hiroki Sayama has sought to achieve what a century ago would have been mere science fiction—creating life on our computers.

amahury.github.io

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Garry Kasparov @garrykasparov.bsky.social · Feb 28

Zelensky is a wartime leader watching his people suffer and die under Russian attacks every day. To be lectured and lied to by Trump and Vance, as they defend the war criminal dictator committing these atrocities, is unimaginable agony. An everlasting shame for America.

Jim Sciutto @jimsciutto.bsky.social · Feb 28

Trump has not uttered a critical word about Putin but he and his VP publicly belittled the leader of the nation Putin invaded.

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Josh Bongard @doctorjosh.bsky.social · Feb 27

Today's #robotics lecture: selective attention.

Now that I've posted this, I should get back to what I was working on before...

...if only I could remember what that was.

youtu.be/BKzOfR9zWCc

2025 Evolutionary robotics course. Lecture 14. Active Categorical Perception.

YouTube video by Josh Bongard

youtu.be

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Le Monde diplomatique @monde-diplomatique.fr · Feb 25

Le 7 janvier, Donald Trump avait estimé que les pays membres de l’OTAN devraient désormais consacrer à leur défense non plus 2 % mais 5 % de leur produit intérieur brut (PIB). ↓

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Josh Bongard @doctorjosh.bsky.social · Feb 25

Today's evolutionary #robotics lecture:

Minimal cognition. Continued.

youtu.be/uWh07Cp5Ynk?...

2025 Evolutionary robotics course. Lecture 13. Minimal cognition continued.

YouTube video by Josh Bongard

youtu.be

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