Chris Adami

Letters AI in front of a black and green computer chip design.

MGI Professor Christoph Adami (@chrisadami.bsky.social) has a new article out in npj Complexity which addresses the question of whether we can use AI to promote a more cooperative society.

Read more here: tinyurl.com/3cjxujmm

Here's a press release about the paper: natsci.msu.edu/news/2026/20...

Shadowgenes: The hidden lives of pseudogenes A blog about science, evolution, the physics of information, black holes, and all that.

Just came across this blog post that I wrote (and forgot about), about the hidden lives of pseudogenes. @philipcball.bsky.social would be interested, as it is "unconventional biology". adamilab.blogspot.com/2015/09/shad...

Promoting cooperation in the public goods game using artificial intelligent agents - npj Complexity npj Complexity - Promoting cooperation in the public goods game using artificial intelligent agents

Can AI be programmed to make others play nice? Evolutionary Game Theory says you can! But not how you might think. Paper out at npj Complexity www.nature.com/articles/s44.... Blog post about the paper: adamilab.blogspot.com/2024/12/can-...

Post a banger that's not in English.

Jacques Brel: Amsterdam

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z0U...

To be clear, Szostak’s functional information is a special case of the “physical complexity” measure I introduced in 2000. It measures the information a sequence has about the environment within which it functions. @philipcball.bsky.social

Incredible that the article fails to mention that Szostak credited the idea of functional information to me in the article where he introduces it, and I wrote an entire book about it. Not great research by the Quanta team.

I’m hoping somebody will tell me how to turn off this bad behavior (I thought I was the only one being annoyed at it). If you have multiple windows open with multiple screens, it results in frantic “where did you go???” expletives.

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free

No matter how many times I click "Do not show this again", I am shown it again, very time. I feel like I'm part of a psychological experiment.

Oh these rascally black holes! (Part I) A blog about science, evolution, the physics of information, black holes, and all that.

Blog posts about it start here: adamilab.blogspot.com/2013/03/oh-t...

Here's what he missed. I've been trying to tell people for over 20 years. link.springer.com/chapter/10.1... Arxiv link is here: arxiv.org/abs/2502.05642

The cathedral of Notre Dame all lit up for New Years. Instead of fireworks, every single bell in the steeple made itself heard

Happy New Year from Paris ‘y all!

"They found the coats on Thursday morning.

Fifteen winter coats. Good ones, not garbage. Hanging on the chain-link fence outside Lincoln Elementary.No note. No explanation. Just coats zipped up like ghosts waiting for bodies.

Principal Morris freaked out. Called the police. "Could be stolen"

A screenshot of the "The one that got away" post that is followed by a post from Moby Dick that muses about whether "this was all just a dream"

Juxtaposition.

The law is the law. It applies to each equally.

The mind as a computational system The present document is an excerpt of an essay that I wrote as part of my application material to graduate school in Computer Science (with a focus on Artificial Intelligence), in 1986. I was not invi...

As far as the illusion of consciousness is concerned, I wrote about it 40 years ago. arxiv.org/abs/1712.01093

Agency is like consciousness in the sense that we'd like to measure it, but when we try we realize that there are non-biological things that have some small amount of it. It cannot be defined in a meaningful way that distinguishes life from non-life.

I describe the T. brucei stuff in my book in chapter 6.4

I think "agency" shares a lot with "consciousness", in that we think we must be able to measure it, and then realize we can't. It's more of a feeling. With consciousness, I always say: "The illusion of consciousness is certainly real".

When I look at biology (all the complex messy stuff) all I see is one goal: getting the genome cleanly into the next generation to ensure information survival. Perhaps I've looked at T. brucei too much, because all their agency is: "if you carry even a single mutation (in mt genes) you must die".

You are looking at life from the point of view of the individual. That is where we disagree. From my point of view, the individual is a means to an end, which is the indefinite persistence of information.

I’m curious what your definition of agency is

What you described has all that.

The Penicillin Myth Competing theories seek to explain inconsistencies surrounding Alexander Fleming’s famed discovery.

This story about the mystery behind Fleming's discovery of Penicillin has an MSU connection! @msumgi.bsky.social
press.asimov.com/articles/pen...

I later found out that biology is not, in fact, boring. But you can certainly teach it in the most boring manner possible.

Fairly simple: I knew after high school that it was going to "science/math". In high school, chemistry (inorganic) was easy but boring. Biology (plants and cell division, basically) was boring. Math was a tool, not science. That left physics. So I went to Bonn University to study physics.

Oh, no doubt about it. The proof that channels have a finite capacity was a huge breakthrough. It’s just odd that he hadn’t seen the formula before. He reinvented it and used it very differently

An exceprt of Max Planck's "Wärmestrahlung" from 1905 in (in German), showing the entropy formula.

And here is p. 125 of my copy of Planck's "Wärmestrahlung" (1905). He even does "max entropy". But I think von Neumann had understood this more deeply, because by realizing it is the classical limit of the vN entropy, it was not at all limited to phase space probabilities, but any states, really.

This is the way.