Elias Najarro
@najarro.science
Computational physicist. Working on self-organisation & AI • Postdoc at @real.itu.dk • SciComm at http://slam.science • 🎭🪩🏔️ 🌐 https://najarro.science
Complexity and interpretability rarely coincide: complex systems are usually too opaque to question, while transparent ones are too simple interesting dynamics to emerge. What if we treated LLM agents as the basic computational unit to build agentic substrates? Paper thread 🧵
1/📢 Announcing our next ERA Journal Club session 📍June 27, 18:00 BST on Discord: discord.gg/m3qvuXgkZ7 This work bridges generative #AI and evolutionary biology by integrating diffusion models into evolutionary optimization frameworks like HADES. 🤖 advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Our paper with @eplantec.bsky.social was accepted at @alifeconf.bsky.social How does criticality move from agents to populations? We study how near-critical dynamics inside individual agents shape collective dynamics at the population scale. arxiv.org/pdf/2605.01818
Self-organising systems often trade compute for memory. Here, we study how prepatterns give developmental systems some nice properties like symmetry breaking and memory capacity. Preprint in the 🧵
Milton@miltonllera.bsky.social · 3mo agoNew research out — A developmental model with morphogenetic scaffoldings to guide self-organisation: a single model, many grown patterns. The memory-compute trade-off but in self-organizing systems. A collab featuring @najarro.science, Jakob Schauser and @risi.bsky.social and yours truly
3D particle life running on browser using WebGPU/WGSL - najarro.science/pl
🦀Call for Contributions – Workshop on Agentic and Generative AI as Artificial Life How can we design agentic AI ecosystems that remain robust, safe, and secure as they become more complex and autonomous? We are inviting contributions to our upcoming workshop: 👉 www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Agentic/
Call for papers for 'Artificial Life for Science and Engineering' at ALife 26. We seek work applying ALife concepts and tools to model real-world systems and engineer solutions — and assist scientific discovery through open-ended and curiosity-driven search. Call info: alifeforscience.github.io
We are thrilled to be returning to GECCO for a second edition of the Evolving Self-Organisation Workshop. We are now accepting paper submissions, so come join us! Check out our website for more info and upcoming announcements evolving-self-organisation-workshop.github.io/gecco-2026/
What a week—projects, tutorials, discussion groups, art demo & even a complexity-alife quiz! Thank you to all the attendees who brought a fantastic energy to this year's ALICE workshop. We can't wait to see you again next year, this time in Norway 🇳🇴 Thank you to @aicentre.dk and @itu.dk !
WE ARE BACK! 🚀🚀🚀 📢 #databeers #copenhagen x Absalon is back on March 10th, SAVE THE DATE! Many thanks to our sponsors, the Danish Data Science Academy and the Danmarks Tekniske Universitet Speaker announcement and tickets out soon, stay tuned!
Less than a week for ALICE—we are looking forward welcome you all in Copenhagen! ⛄ You can find the updated program here: aliceworkshop.org/program/
In Bristol for the week for the AI, Engineering Biology and Beyond conference hosted by @chofski.bsky.social. Very excited to meet the UK synthbio community. First day hackathon event was a blast!
Hey complexity and complexity-adjacent people: What are some of your favorite pop-sci books? Are there any you've had your eye on but haven't had a chance to read yet? They can be new or old. I'd just love to know what y'all are reading!
This year's ALICE guest speakers 🧑🔬 - Angel Goñi-Moreno - @angelgm.bsky.social - Alyssa Adams - @alyssa-m-adams.bsky.social - Alexander Mordvintsev - Eric Medvet - @ericmedvetts.bsky.social - Kyrre Glette - @kyrre2000.bsky.social - Stefano Nichele - @stenichele.bsky.social - Susan Stepney
Our (in the making) paper combining morphogenetic fields and neural cellular cellular automata with @miltonllera.bsky.social, Eleni Nisioti & @risi.bsky.social got a little award at @alife2025.bsky.social #ALife2025 💮✨
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
Horse genes shedding light on human history 5000 years ago.. Fascinating.
Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 10mo agoJust caught up on this fascinating paper in Science in August. It reports evidence of strong selective pressure from breeding of horses around 5000-3000 years ago in Central Asia. One reason it's interesting is that the selection is *really* strong... /1 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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
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 ⛩️
The yearly ALife virtual creature competition is back 👾
ALIFE Conference 2025@alife2025.bsky.social · 11mo agoBe 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. ⬇️ ⬇️
Nice illustration of the power of graph representations to capture multiscale complexity and regularities youtu.be/YGLNyHd2w10
Adventures in State Space
YouTube video by 2swap
youtu.be
The late John Conway "I don't wanna say anything negative about Wolfram.., so I don't wanna say anything about Wolfram" www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1bD...
LOVE/HATE Relationship with LIFE | John Horton Conway | Talks at Google
YouTube video by Talks at Google
youtube.com
Cultures of biological neurons outperforming deep RL in sample efficiency 🔥 spj.science.org/doi/10.34133...
Dynamic Network Plasticity and Sample Efficiency in Biological Neural Cultures: A Comparative Study with Deep Reinforcement Learning | Cyborg and Bionic Systems
In this study, we investigate the complex network dynamics of in vitro neural systems using DishBrain, which integrates live neural cultures with high-density multi-electrode arrays in real-time, clos...
spj.science.org
Beautiful text. Embracing the problem of induction—despite tech narratives, people aren't their data.
Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · last yr.Hi all. I wrote a bit about my father, who died suddenly on June 30. It is also about the real possibility of change against illusions of perpetuity, and what data can and cannot do for remembering what is unsaid. mail.cyberneticforests.com/my-fathers-d...
The European instance of @neuripsconf.bsky.social hosted in Copenhagen ✨
NeurIPS Europe@neuripseurope.bsky.social · last yr.EurIPS is coming! 📣 Mark your calendar for Dec. 2-7, 2025 in Copenhagen 📅 EurIPS is a community-organized conference where you can present accepted NeurIPS 2025 papers, endorsed by @neuripsconf.bsky.social and @nordicair.bsky.social and is co-developed by @ellis.eu eurips.cc
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 🧵
Can using synthetic approaches to build biology help teach us the design principles of how embryos build themselves? 👷♀️🔧 If this is a question that interests you, come and share your thoughts at this Royal Society Workshop on Generative Biology www.royalsoc.ac.uk/science-even...
