What a strange time we are living in. As astronauts travel far into the silence of space, carrying with them the brilliance, curiosity, and collective dreams of our species, an ignorant, corrupt bully leads the most powerful country and threatens to “erase an entire civilisation.” We must stop him.
Is the universe really fine-tuned for life? The claim that even tiny changes in fundamental constants would make life impossible (the God-needed argument) is been dismantled by recent research: Life can emerge under a wide range of physical conditions ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019PhR....
Curious about the origin of development during the transition to multicellularity?
A very belated preprint alert: bit.ly/4rr2mHU
Reproduction emerges from ecological interactions at the onset of multicellularity.
A short 🧵 with lots of videos...
We are thrilled to be returning to GECCO for a second edition of the Evolving Self-Organisation Workshop.
We are now accepting paper submissions, so come join us!
Check out our website for more info and upcoming announcements evolving-self-organisation-workshop.github.io/gecco-2026/
The SONI session turned out a great—shout out to the speakers & the panelists @emilydolson.bsky.social, @risi.bsky.social, @blaiseaguera.bsky.social & Sidney Pontes-Filho for great talks & discussion on how we can rethink intelligence under the complexity lens.
#ALife2025 @alife2025.bsky.social
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
Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species
1
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...
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...
I don't know why, I just love these cell simulations :)
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...
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
And the optimization of the simulation parameters towards desired objectives, e.g creatures sensing and climbing gradients :
This work also recapitulates previous results with the Flow-Lenia system Like the discovery of complex emergent creatures form random search only:
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 ?
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.
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:
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
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:
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
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 !
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 🧵
New video on the recently discovered Mosura is up on my channel!
#paleoart #mosura #3DAnimation #SciArt
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynHJ...
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....
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...
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...
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
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...
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.
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
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). ↓
Today's evolutionary #robotics lecture:
Minimal cognition. Continued.
youtu.be/uWh07Cp5Ynk?...
