https://t.co/4wmSECbgz1

On @BBCr4today yesterday @j_amesmarriott used a brilliant junk food metaphor to describe search results produced by AI chatbots, calling them "ultra-processed information, superficially nutritious but actually pretty empty." Listen at https://t.co/Mpq1Gwy3D9 (starts at 2:47:42).

In 1951, in between working on his application to visit John von Neumann's Electronic Computer Project group at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Nils Aall Barricelli also found time to file a patent for "An Improved Chest of Drawers"! 😁

I'm looking forward to reading this novel, written by microbiologist Richard Goodman under the pen name Bonham Richards. Goodman was a friend of ALife pioneer Nils Aall Barricelli, and George Dyson tells me that the character Angelo Kraakmo in the book is based upon Barricelli!

The 40th anniversary of the @ALifeConf conference series is approaching. Please contribute your memories and archival materials to help me prepare a book for this anniversary in the field of #ArtificialLife. #ALIFE40 @alifeofficial #alife https://t.co/PZ66T5mHip

#ALIFE2025 will take place in Kyoto, Japan (6-10 October).

The npj Complexity journal has an open call for a new collection topic "Unnatural Histories: Investigating the Improbable with Experimental Evolution and Artificial Life". Accepting submissions from now up to 12 Sept 2025

I'm happy to announce that the free online version of "Rise of the Self-Replicators" has now been updated to the 2nd edition of the author-formatted version of the book, which includes the 2024 afterword as an additional chapter. Find the online version at

To be clear, I don't have any money to pay for a translation, but I anticipate we would get this published in a journal with an introduction authored by me (and the translator if they wished) and with the translator listed as a co-author.

My plan would be to have the English translation published in a journal

I've finally got a copy of Nils Barricelli's first paper on Artificial Life, in Italian (1954). Would be great to get it translated into English. My preference would be to have this done by a skilled human translator rather than AI. Any bilingual Italian-English folk interested?

I'm enjoying reading @MitchWaldrop's venerable account of the origin and early years of @sfiscience, published in 1992. Wonderful to learn that John Holland developed his first classifier system in machine code (not even assembly language) on his Commodore computer at home 👏

I'm pleased to announce a new second edition of the author-formatted version of our book Rise of the Self-Replicators, which includes my 2024 afterword (originally published in the Artificial Life journal) as an extra chapter. More details & free download: https://t.co/Fkxb9XleYC

.@decarpentier_nl used a genetic algorithm to evolve the linkage design for his walking wooden coffee table, the Carpentopod. The result is beautiful

⭐️We are seeking proposals to host the Conference on Artificial Life in 2026 and 2027. ⭐️ 🟢Conferences should be a hybrid format. 🟢No geographical constraints. 🟢Support from ISAL RE: conference infrastructure + submission reviews. Full details here:

... it's a second hand book but arrived in very good condition, complete with a 3.5" disk and 3D goggles! The first 100 pages are a general introduction to ALife, followed by 170 pages describing the Boppers program that is supplied on the disk.

Last month I came across "The Artificial Life Playhouse" published by the Waite Group in 1993. @remisussan then pointed me to another book on ALife published by the same company in the same year, this one by @rudytheelder. Delighted to have now taken delivery of it! ...

It was fantastic to have the opportunity of a long discussion yesterday with the one and only @kenneth0stanley about open endedness and open-ended evolution. Many thanks to @barbalet for hosting on his Last Monkey Standing channel!

A very different conversation than the usual: I joined @barbalet for his Last Monkey Standing podcast, along with leading open-ended evolution researcher @drtimt, to discuss the connections and contrasts between AI & Alife in the field of open-endedness:

Sorting through a box of stuff from PhD days I came across my notes from the Digital Biota 2 conference in Cambridge, 1998! Including talks from Richard Dawkins/Steve Grand/Larry Yaeger/Tom Ray/Douglas Adams/Maggie Boden/Rudy Rucker/Chris Langton. Wow!!!