chrxh

Happy New Year
ALIEN v5.0 is on track!...even though development is taking longer than expected. It will be conceptually and technically on another level than its predecessor. How this will affect evolution simulations is an exciting question. I hope we can find an answer to that sometime this year!

Be part of the next generation of virtual creatures:
Enter the 2025 Virtual Creatures Competition (VCC)!

Held at #ALIFE2025, the #VCC is an annual competition to showcase recent research in the field of artificial life.

Judges and prizes to be announced soon.
⬇️ ⬇️

First update of my online webgpu particle life simulator: the number of particle types is now also randomized each time (from 2 to 16), leading to greater variety!

lisyarus.github.io/webgpu/parti...

The Climate Chronicles: Exploring Earth's Climate History with Professor Dagomar Degroot To spread awareness that “climate change isn’t just an environmental issue; it’s a human story woven into the fabric of our civilization’s rise and fall,” Georgetown University historian Professor…

buff.ly/58lSFSu
In a recent #SETILive, @dagomardegroot.bsky.social joined @planetarypan.bsky.social to discuss The Climate Chronicles podcast. The podcast focuses on the Earth’s climatic evolution, spanning 50 million years, to shed light on what history can teach us about today's climate crisis. 🧪

A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems | Quanta Magazine Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among species.

If one species emits a powerful enough chemical, its impact can ripple out across an entire ecosystem.

Some visual impressions after 11 days of non-stop simulation starting with a simple organism (to reproduce: run `Primordial Oceans/Initial` simulation from the in-game browser.).

YouTube video by Jeffrey Ventrella Clusters - An Asymmetrical Particle System with Emergent Patterns

Now on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZED...

Evolution and The Knightian Blindspot of Machine Learning This paper claims that machine learning (ML) largely overlooks an important facet of general intelligence: robustness to a qualitatively unknown future in an open world. Such robustness relates to Kni...

But this is where the tweet ends - and the paper begins.

Great work by @joelbot3000.bsky.social, Elliot Meyerson, Tarek El-Gaaly, Ken Stanley, and yours truly.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.13075

Topological constraints on self-organisation in locally interacting systems All intelligence is collective intelligence, in the sense that it is made of parts which must align with respect to system-level goals. Understanding the dynamics which facilitate or limit navigation ...

New #preprint with Francesco Sacco and Dalton Sakthidivel - physics, #selforganization, #diverseintelligence 🧪

arxiv.org/abs/2501.13188
"Topological constraints on self-organisation in locally interacting systems"

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!

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Sometimes one has to step off the beaten track and also be prepared to let promising ideas fail in simulations.

I've worked out new concepts that will need to be tested in prototypes.
I don't know where this journey is going!

... and that's the fun part!

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🎉 Happy New Year to everyone 🎉

The development of ALIEN in 2024 was focused on lots of incremental improvements and smaller extensions.
Next year, however, there could be major changes to the core model that can no longer be addressed with successive minor updates.

The simulation parameter window is the heart of ALIEN. It has now been replaced by a much more potent version, enabling features such as naming, reordering, opening in a separate window, and cloning of parameter zones and radiation sources. A quick filter has also been added in v4.12 for navigation.

Introducing ASAL: Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models

Blog: sakana.ai/asal/

We propose a new method called Automated Search for Artificial Life (ASAL) which uses foundation models to automate the discovery of the most interesting and open-ended artificial lifeforms!

ALIEN version 4.11 has been released. Alongside numerous smaller improvements it provides advanced autosave functions and an improved user experience due to asynchronous data transfer to the file system and server.
YouTube: youtu.be/kAhbZK-ibng
GitHub: github.com/chrxh/alien

#CUDA #ArtificialLife