A great video summary of #ALIFE2023. Thanks very much Jitka Cejkova
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5xkh70kngQ

国際会議３つハシゴしましたけどやっぱり ALIFE がダントツで狂ってて一番面白いです．
#ALIFE2023 @alife2023

テッド・チャン氏の主張はすごく真面目で真っ当だと思う。物理レベルのシミュレーション無しに、偶然に意識が誕生することはないだろう。一方で、意識があるように人を騙すシステムは容易にできる。そして2つの議論は完全に分けるべきだ、という主張。虚構を扱う作家として筋が通ってる #ALIFE2023

In about 15 minutes at #ALife2023 , I'll be running a session in Room 2 on the ALife Encyclopedia (a wiki-like community-curated reference website)! Stop by to learn about the project, debug any issues with contributing, and participate in a mini writing hackathon!

Really interesting talk by @sethbullock and @hirokisayama at #ALIFE2023 on the emergence of extremism and fragmentation in a social network model. New innovation here was allowing social preferences to vary by person. I like the observation that having a few individuals who value novel opinions can make a really big difference

👋#ALIFE2023 people - if you're interested in how extreme opnions and extreme communities arise on adaptive social networks of heterogeneous individuals, check my paper with
@HirokiSayama in the Complex Systems II session after lunch!
#networks #opinions #dynamics #heterogeneity

👋#ALIFE2023 people - if you're interested in how extreme opnions and extreme communities arise on adaptive social networks of heterogeneous individuals, check my paper with
@HirokiSayama
in the Complex Systems II session after lunch!
#networks #opinions #dynamics #heterogeneity

More cool Lenia work from Bert Chan at #ALIFE2023 ! He has classified the various attractors within each type of "creature". These attractors are like subspecies and can be arranged into a stability landscape to conceptualize their relationships to each other

👋#ALIFE2023 people - if you're interested in whether people can deal with swarm degradation, check my upcoming talk in Room 2 in the "(In)Human Values and Artificial Agency" session after Ted Chiang's keynote...
#swarms #faults #malice #humans #values

I really love the point that Ted Chiang is making in his #ALIFE2023 keynote about how the idea that AI can learn by having information poured into it without interactive teaching seems a lot like the (now largely discredited) idea in education that humans learn by being fed facts

I just learned that @ChrisBuckley (a great comp neuroscience academic) got promoted to full Prof at Sussex University. Typical of his modesty that I had to travel half way around the world to #ALIFE2023 in Japan to find this out!

Congratulations Chris - v well deserved promotion!

For such a transition to happen, both abiotic and biotic parameters must be right. Today, Max will discuss early work on abiotic parameters. Tomorrow, Sydney Leither will talk about the other half of this work, which focuses on the biotic parameters (i.e. ecological interactions).

Paper: https://direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedings/isal/35/73/116913

#ALIFE2023

Up soon in the Artificial Chemistries session at #ALIFE2023, Max Foreback will be talking about some preliminary results from work we're doing with David Baum on how to characterize transitions from purely ecological to evolutionary dynamics.

Paper: https://t.co/gtgC1qm3Zd

These transitions happen in circumstances such as the origin of life, where a community of individual objects that aren't evolving come together and begin acting as a Darwinian individual.

#ALIFE2023
I just watched a very, very cool presentation on Alife in games! Amorphous Fortress: Observing Emergent Behavior in Multi-Agent FSMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13169

I love that #ALife2023 is a place where people can compare beavers to Torrent 😂

Unsurprisingly, @livcomp 's talk at #ALIFE2023 is off to a mind-blowing start! He has created self-replicating creatures that flourish in his non-deterministic T2 Tile computing platform.

sitting in #ALIFE2023 conference talks got me thinking...

proposal: a new PowerPoint function, "shitshow" - emulates on your laptop screen the way that your slideshow will look to an audience...

simply applies a random combination of:
- shrink it
- blur it
- dim it
- crop it

+ every digit, noun and verb is replaced with a random alternative (to defeat your priors)

we need to design slides that can cope with this kind of abuse before we stand up on a stage and present things..

Switched over to the Artificial Chemistry session at #ALife2023 to see Hiroki Kojima's talk about showing that Lenia (super cool continuous cellular automaton developed by Bert Chan) can be implemented as a reaction-diffusion system. This is fascinating work! I've been thinking lately that we (or at least I) don't give diffusion enough credit for it's ability to produce complex behaviors, and this seems like another argument in that direction

Packed room for Piper Welch's talk at #ALIFE2023 ! She is presenting some very cool work on evolving biobots to explore different environments. In general, she found that bots that move in curved patterns are the best explorers. Evolved swarms also had more complex interactions in more complex environments. Evolved swarms were also able to scale well and still successfully explore large environments.

Some #ALIFE2023 thoughts after day one..

By comparison with previous (dimly remembered) ALIFEs, this time:
- new blood/new guard: more first timers! more early career people!
- fast and loose: talks are even shorter! more topic diversity between and within sessions!

at least this is what is feels like to someone getting older, slower and more stiff...