Erwan Plantec

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...

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

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...

Self-Organising Neural Intelligence(s) Important dates: Submission Deadline: May 4th, 2025 Author Notification: TBA

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

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.

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.

YouTube video by Josh Bongard 2025 Evolutionary robotics course. Lecture 14. Active Categorical Perception.

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). ↓

YouTube video by Josh Bongard 2025 Evolutionary robotics course. Lecture 13. Minimal cognition continued.

Today's evolutionary #robotics lecture:

Minimal cognition. Continued.

youtu.be/uWh07Cp5Ynk?...

Trump’s siege of science: how the first 30 days unfolded and what’s next Nature - The breakneck pace and devastating impact of the administration’s policy changes has researchers shocked.

The breakneck pace and devastating impact of the Trump administration’s policy changes has researchers shocked.

https://go.nature.com/4iboVwb

How do parasites expand the genomic complexity of life? In our new paper on "Turing parasites" with Luis Seoane
@brigan.bsky.social shows how a computational model of host-parasite coevolution displays open-ended evolution
journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

Planetary Life, a game about planet, life and evolution simulation!

✅ Procedural planets 🌍
✅ Climate simulation ⛈️
✅ Global disasters 🌋☄️
✅ Create and evolve creatures 🐟🦎🐞
✅ Create and evolve plants 🌱🌴🌲
⬜ Cells

#GodotEngine #gamedev #indiedev

New paper w/ Luke Strgar

sites.google.com/view/co-desi...

...in a nutshell:

⛰️ differentiable physics
🏋️ morphological pretraining
🧠 a universal controller
🧬 zero shot evolution
💡 adaptive phototaxis
☠️ diversity collapse
🔧 generational finetuning
🦘 few shot evolution