(YouTube) Hearing tactile interactions, visualizing sounds, touching distances: Current directions in sensory conversion research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2v5eXnCx9g&t=0s Keynote by Malika Auvray at #ALIFE2023, with #The_vOICe visual-to-auditory sensory substitution

I'm finally sorting through my #Alife2023 pictures to write the blog posts I promised to @emilydolson, when I came across this one.

This is a chart of flower types and their uses that I found at Sapporo's Botanical garden.

Please notice on the bottom right the "incantation goods" legend, which in Japanese is marked as "curses" :3

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

I'm surprised that #ALIFE2023 is the first time that Ted Chiang was invited to a science conference! Totally agree with his point that the relationship between SciFi and science is really synergistic, and it was really great having him here. I hope we can have more science fiction writers at future conferences!

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

Also, we created artificial lives ourselves yesterday during the #ALIFE2023 excursion to teamLab's Future Park and Animals of Flowers, Symbiotic Live @ Sapporo Art Museum - say hi to my strawberry hat squit (and me)!

This morning, I presented our work on the evolution of dynamic collective behaviors by minimizing surprise #ALIFE2023. Despite being in the first session after last night's conference dinner, there was quite some audience! Thanks for showing up :)

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!

fab talk by @livcomp at #ALIFE2023

also I now have a new life ambition so if someone could tell me how to become a "Hard Cell G" that would be great

https://youtu.be/8CvNimsfvzg

Coming from the systems biology background (and actually have worked on chromothripsis & segmental aneuploidy), Pamela Lyon's #ALIFE2023 opening keynote is somewhat underwhelming.

The thing with experimental biology is that it is insanely hard and weird. Results that were thought to have been extensively supported by experiment and theory prove to be wrong (lately amyloid prion theory of Alzheimer's).

1/🧵

It's a bit a pity that as remote participants in #ALIFE2023 we don't get to see the art exhibition - it does look quite interesting!

Catching up with talks at #ALIFE2023 I could not attend until now and I am really liking the Cliff Bohm, Arend Hintze and Jory Schossau "A Simple Sparsity Function to Promote Evolutionary Search".

1. Dismiss "small world networks" right out of the bat to talk about sparsity. Amazing. SWNs do not represent any biological reality (Lior Pachter had a really good writeup about that on birdsite)

2. Show that sparsity in RNNs is needed for RNNs to learn simple tasks when neurons are numerous.

1/2

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

Now watching a talk by Craig Reynolds on the evolution of camouflage. Suddenly the session room is full of people to hear the creator of boids. I read the paper in advance, and it is a pretty nice model, and fun experiment.

Mac problems sharing the slides with zoom is making things difficult, though.

#ALIFE2023

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

We have the pleasure of having Ted Chiang talking about education of artificial beings in our home, and we are wasting it on ChatGPT discussion. #ALIFE2023

I feel uncomfortable with Takashi representing the alife community there. #ALIFE2023 alife is not llms, the cool thing of alife is how many different things people are doing.