FLOWERS is offering Master's internships! Jeremy Perez and I are supervising a project combining artificial life and cultural evolution. We are also offering a position continuing the team's research on discovering sensimotor agency in Lenia. Check all the topics below! flowers.inria.fr/jobs/

3 papers from @flowersinria team are presented this week at the @alife2025.bsky.social , leveraging curiosity-driven AI to explore complex behaviors in #Lenia All first authors are attending the conference if you want to discuss with them. Link to interactive websites, papers and code below:

Lenia forest fire model

We're excited to announce final program of the @alife2025.bsky.social SONI session which will host a panel discussion with @blaiseaguera.bsky.social, @risi.bsky.social, @emilydolson.bsky.social & Sidney Pontes-Filho Check out the full program: sites.google.com/view/soni-al... See you in Kyoto ⛩️

New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2505.15849 : Reed Bender (www.linkedin.com/in/reed-bend...), Karina Kofman (www.linkedin.com/in/karina-ko...), @blaiseaguera.bsky.social "What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life"

What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life

The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of discipli...

arxiv.org

Very happy that our paper received both the EvoApps best paper and the EvoStar best student paper! Congrats team!! Emergent Kin Selection of Altruistic Feeding via Non-Episodic Neuroevolution arxiv.org/abs/2411.10536

Emergent kin selection of altruistic feeding via non-episodic neuroevolution

Kin selection theory has proven to be a popular and widely accepted account of how altruistic behaviour can evolve under natural selection. Hamilton's rule, first published in 1964, has since been exp...

arxiv.org

Clément Moulin-Frier@clemmoulinfrier.bsky.social · last yr.

Max Taylor-Davies will present our new paper at the Evostar conference on Thursday: Emergent Kin Selection of Altruistic Feeding via Non-Episodic Neuroevolution arxiv.org/abs/2411.10536 A joint work with @hamongautier.bsky.social , Timothé Boulet and myself. A quick summary below:

Here is a cool Flow-Lenia simulation, which is a continuous cellular automaton with two distinct features: 1. Mass conservation - sum of all activations is constant through time 2. Localized update rules - enables simulations with differently behaving matter on the same grid

The 21st edition of the #ALife newsletter is out! This month we have a TON of ALife videos, 2 paper reviews, an amazing simulation and MORE! alife-newsletter.github.io/Newsletter/e...

SCHC officially published ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/109...

Structural Cellular Hash Chemistry

Hash Chemistry, a minimalistic artificial chemistry model of open-ended evolution, has recently been extended to non-spatial and cellular versions. The non-spatial version successfully demonstrated co...

ieeexplore.ieee.org

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...

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Complex cell-like structures in Flow Lenia

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

Self-Organising Neural Intelligence(s)

Important dates: Submission Deadline: May 4th, 2025 Author Notification: TBA

sites.google.com

Advertisement!: PhD-summer school at the Globe Institute, UCPH 18-22 August. From interstellar dust to habitable planets and the conditions for life. Interdisciplinary lectures with perspectives from astronomy, cosmochemistry, geology, and astrobiology. For more see: www.dust2dna.dk

This is great news that Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton were awarded the #TuringAward 🚀 Thread 🧵

Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · last yr.

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton have won the A.M. Turing Award for developing the theoretical foundations of reinforcement learning, a key method behind many major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. 🧵

Flowlenia with local update rules