Music is fundamental.

I didn’t expect a short video about an octopus to stay with me this long.

At first, it looks like a simple, almost playful interaction. But the more you watch, the more something deeper emerges: a learning process unfolding between two completely different forms of intelligence.

🧵 1/

Engineered by slow time, living in (too) fast time Can we adapt at the speed we create? Some reflections after watching the launch of Artemis II

The problem is not simply that technology is changing fast, but that a species shaped by slow biological evolution now lives inside a system whose rate of change is increasingly generated from within.

New #ComplexityThoughts 🧪🧬🤖🌍 is out:
manlius.substack.com/p/engineered...

You are a pro player, my post works only for us mortals.

The yellow core of a disrupted spiral galaxy is surrounded by irregular, translucent spiral arms. The inner part of the galaxy is seen at an angle, so that it appears oval-shaped rather than circular. Dark brown dust lanes and pink star forming regions cross a yellow haze of older stars. The faint blue arms unfurl from the center, like paint flung out of a spinning canvas. They are dotted with blue star clusters. The arms stretch out to the right of the frame. The black background of space is filled with foreground stars and tiny background galaxies.

VLT image of Arp 289, also known as NGC 3981.

This image was captured as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems Program, which uses the Very Large Telescope to photograph beautiful objects in the southern skies when conditions don’t allow scientific observations to be made.

Credit: ESO
Source

That's likely today. But how much time before it will win easily against you in any circumstance?

Toyota has unveiled CUE7, the latest version of its basketball-playing robot YouTube video by Cybernews

While most headlines are about the LLM hype, robotics and embodied AI are running fast.

This guy, named CUE7 and built by Toyota, can play basketball better than me and likely than you.

youtube.com/shorts/Or323...

When we design artificial systems, are we enabling this kind of open-ended, co-adaptive interaction?
Or are we still building systems that only simulate it from a distance?

Curious to hear how you see this.

#ComplexSystems #AI #Learning

/fin

They don’t fit neatly into our categories.

We tend to look for intelligence inside the individual, but moments like this suggest we should also look "between" individuals.

And maybe that’s the question this raises for us, especially now.

4/

This is a familiar pattern for complexity scientists:
intelligence as something that emerges from feedback loops, from trial-and-error, from being responsive to another agent.

🐙 with their distributed nervous systems and highly embodied cognition, push us to rethink our default assumptions

3/

No shared language. No shared evolutionary path. And yet there’s coordination, curiosity, even a kind of mutual calibration.

Strikingly, the “learning” here lives in the interaction: each move reshapes the next, each hesitation, each adjustment, feeds back into the system.

2/

I didn’t expect a short video about an octopus to stay with me this long.

At first, it looks like a simple, almost playful interaction. But the more you watch, the more something deeper emerges: a learning process unfolding between two completely different forms of intelligence.

🧵 1/

I taught an octopus piano (It took 6 months) YouTube video by Mattias Krantz

What a nice story about this learning process and this beautiful yet unconventional human-octupus interaction!

youtu.be/PcWnQ7fYzwI?...

Direct and indirect benefits of cooperation in collective defense against predation | PNAS The evolution and maintenance of public goods cooperation, despite cheating, remains a key interest in social biology. Identifying how ecological f...

Contribution to the collective defense provides both direct and indirect benefits and that individuals regulate their contributions mainly based on the social environment, resulting in variation within and among natural populations.

#Evolution #ComplexSystems

www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Language models transmit behavioural traits through hidden signals in data - Nature During model distillation, large language models can subtly transmit traits unrelated to the training data.

A theoretical result showing that subliminal learning arises in neural networks under broad conditions.

As artificial intelligence systems are increasingly trained on the outputs of one another, they may inherit properties not visible in the data

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NGC 602 and Beyond apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap26041...
The clouds may look like an oyster, and the stars like pearls, but look beyond. Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy some 200 thousand light-years distant, lies 5 million year young star cluster NGC 602.

Where are the power laws?

Complexity Thoughts: Issue #80 Unraveling complexity: building knowledge, one paper at a time

#ComplexityThoughts is read by 3,400+ readers!

This week, I’ve been mapping recent results in complexity science across disciplines, from biochemistry to neuroscience, from evolution to human behavior

#80 👉 open.substack.com/pub/manlius/...

Available as a “deep-dive” 🎧 on Spotify & Apple

Complexity Thoughts: Issue #80 Unraveling complexity: building knowledge, one paper at a time

#ComplexityThoughts is read by 3,400+ readers!

This week, I’ve been mapping recent results in complexity science across disciplines, from biochemistry to neuroscience, from evolution to human behavior

#80 👉 open.substack.com/pub/manlius/...

Available as a “deep-dive” 🎧 on Spotify & Apple

🙏🙏🙏🙏

A bit cooked to deal with those super luminous stars, but we loved to make it! @scrutacieli.bsky.social

Wide-field astrophotography of the Orion region: at lower left, the orange glow of the Flame Nebula near a bright blue star; at upper right, the pink and violet Orion Nebula (M42) with surrounding blue reflection nebulae. The field is filled with dense stars and dark dust lanes, captured with high contrast and fine detail.

Not giving up with my son, despite the night lights of the beautiful city of Padova..

From the Flame Nebula to Orion Nebula hundreds of images gathered (2.5h in total) and aligned until Orion emerged, unfolding its light in a slow, silent bloom ✨

#Astrophotography
@kat-astro-bot.bsky.social

Peró è lì, l'hai catturata!

Non so se riesco a farcela alle 4.del mattino, ma adesso è nel nostro radar e mio figlio ne sarà contento. Grazie Sky!

Our sun eclipsed by the moon. The "dark side of the moon" and the "Earthset".

Amazing views from Artemis II and a change of perspectives.

_____
Credits: NASA

More!
images.nasa.gov

Our sun eclipsed by the moon. The "dark side of the moon" and the "Earthset".

Amazing views from Artemis II and a change of perspectives.

_____
Credits: NASA

This Would Be Genocide Trump's declaration that “a whole civilization will die tonight" went a step farther than even he has ever gone before.

Oh 🇺🇸, what are you doing?
And why?

Really, come on, why?

www.huffpost.com/entry/donald...

the Heart and Soul Nebulae in shades of orange and yellow and white

I reprocessed old archival data from NASA/ESA/STScI/Digitized Sky Survey II to give a new twist to these beauties: the Heart and Soul Nebulae, 7,500 light-years away in the enchanting constellation of Cassiopeia.

Have a nice Sunday!

@siril.org

Eh ma sai, caro Giulio, almeno con questo cambiamento climatico c'è finalmente il sole a Pasquetta. Vuoi mettere?

the Heart and Soul Nebulae in shades of orange and yellow and white

I reprocessed old archival data from NASA/ESA/STScI/Digitized Sky Survey II to give a new twist to these beauties: the Heart and Soul Nebulae, 7,500 light-years away in the enchanting constellation of Cassiopeia.

Have a nice Sunday!

@siril.org