Tim Taylor

Today - 29/07/2025 - BBC Sounds News and current affairs, including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.

On BBC Radio 4 yesterday @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social used a brilliant junk food metaphor to describe search results produced by AI chatbots, calling them "ultra-processed information, superficially nutritious but actually pretty empty." Listen at bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... (starts at 2:47:42).

In 1951, in between working on his application to visit John von Neumann's Electronic Computer Project group at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Nils Aall Barricelli also found time to file a patent for "An Improved Chest of Drawers"! 😁 worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationD...

Super excited to have had a phone call and ongoing conversation with Nils Aall Barricelli's nephew. While working at IAS in Princeton, Nils would have discussions with Albert Einstein on the bus - the two of them were some of the few who did not have cars!

I'm currently regenerating the figures in the paper as the original ones were not very clear. This has entailed me rewriting Barricelli's simulations. I'm currently investigating a discrepancy in the results of the longest run reported in the paper. Either he or I have made a mistake!

Yes, the translation is in progress! I'm lucky to have found a team of three Italians to work with, including a professional translator. We are writing a commentary and will be submitting it to the Artificial Life journal soon. I will also make it freely available on my website when it is published.

I'm currently working with two Italian colleagues to produce a good quality English translation of Barricelli's 1954 paper. I didn't know that Luca Manzoni was interested in this - I'll get in touch with him! 👍

I'm looking forward to reading this novel, written by microbiologist Richard Goodman under the pen name Bonham Richards. Goodman was a friend of Artificial Life pioneer Nils Aall Barricelli, and George Dyson tells me that the character Angelo Kraakmo in the book is based upon Barricelli!

I love opening an old book in a library (this one from 1888) and wondering who was the first person to look at it? And who was the last?

I once again find myself lured back to the National Library of Scotland in search of stories about self-reproducing machines. This time I'm chasing up some leads that help fill the relative paucity of contributions covered in "Rise of the Self-Replicators" over the 1880s and 1890s. More info soon!

Save the date!
The annual #Conference on #ArtificialLife - #ALIFE2025 will take place in the heart of Kyoto, Japan, from 6-10 October 2025. The conference logo, official website launch, and more details coming soon!

Unnatural Histories: Investigating the Improbable with Experimental Evolution and Artificial Life This collection invite submissions that employ experimental and theoretical approaches to investigate life's alternative possibilities. Through this ...

The npj Complexity journal has an open call for a new collection topic "Unnatural Histories: Investigating the Improbable with Experimental Evolution and Artificial Life". Accepting submissions from now up to 12 Sept 2025 www.nature.com/collections/...

Rise of the Self-Replicators: Early Visions of Machines, AI and Robots That Can Reproduce and Evolve In Rise of the Self-Replicators we delve into the deep history of thought about machines, AI and robots that can reproduce and evolve. Although these might seem like very modern concepts, we show that...

I'm happy to announce that the free online version of "Rise of the Self-Replicators" has now been updated to the 2nd edition of the author-formatted version of the book, which includes the 2024 afterword as an additional chapter. Find the online version at www.tim-taylor.com/selfrepbook/...

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To be clear, I don't have any money to pay for a translation, but I anticipate we would get this published in a journal with an introduction authored by me (and the translator if they wished) and with the translator listed as a co-author.

My plan would be to have the English translation published in a journal

I've finally got a copy of Nils Barricelli's 1st paper on Artificial Life, in Italian (1954). Would be great to get it translated into English. My preference would be to have this done by a skilled human translator rather than AI. Any bilingual Italian-English folk out there who might be interested?

It looks like it's working now! I had tried using #ALife before but that didn't seem to work either, but maybe it just takes a while for tagged posts to appear on the list. But anyway, thanks @sinalana.bsky.social for sorting it out 👍

The #alife feed doesn't seem to be picking up messages with #alife hashtag 🤔 @sinalana.bsky.social

Here's an #ALife starter pack from @manuelbaltieri.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/manu...

I'm enjoying reading Mitchell Waldrop's venerable account of the origin and early years of @sfiscience.bsky.social, published in 1992. Wonderful to learn that John Holland developed his first classifier system in machine code (not even assembly language) on his Commodore computer at home 👏

I'm pleased to announce a new second edition of the author-formatted version of our book Rise of the Self-Replicators, which includes my 2024 afterword (originally published in the Artificial Life journal) as an extra chapter. More details & free download: www.tim-taylor.com/news/posts/2...

Many thanks for the shout-out about our book! I'm really loving the ALife advent calendar - what a great idea 👍😀