A Word from the Team

Welcome to the 17th issue of the Artificial Life Newsletter. Like last year, this edition was a physical edition, in tandem with ALIFE 2024, in Denmark. Due to life (not the artificial kind), the digital version was delayed this time, and we apologize for that! As a manner of apology, we'll try to add some little online updates for each of the collaborations below (and maybe some extra text that could not make into the digital format due to space constraints).

The theme for the 17th issue is connections -- the yearly conference is the perfect opportunity to connect with new people, ideas and opportunities. With this in mind, we offer you a live list of ALifers social media (that you can join!), a modular origami that you can assemble with others in the conference, and the team's favorite ALife-y books, papers and entertainment for your lunch break or the long way back home.

Don't forget to subscribe! You can follow us by RSS, or by adding your e-mail to this form.

Header Image: Modular origami by Ardonik, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Alife Social Directory

Do you want to connect to new ALifers and find out what they're up to?

We have created an online ALife Social Directory that gathers links to the social media accounts of members of the community. It includes Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter and many others.

You can add your own socials to the directory by filling this form, or sending a pull request to the Directory repository!

Post-Conference Update: A lot of people have added their socials, and sent code updates to make the directory prettier and easier to understand! Even if you did look at it during the conference, it is a great time to check it out again!

Recommendations from the Team

Need something to read or do on your way home back from the conference? We got you covered, with a list of our favorite papers, books, entertainment and others! Load them up on your computer, and spend some quality time in the plane, or that weekend recovering from the conference.

Note: For the physical newsletter, Gabe made some really nice illustrations for each subsection.

Papers

• Lana: "The Interface Theory of Perception", by D.D. Hoffman. The provocative idea that accurately perceiving reality can be evolutionarily detrimental!
• Imy: "Artificial Life: Discipline or Method? Report on a Debate Held at ECAL '99". The question in this paper is worth revisiting and reflecting on even 25 years later, as the breadth and depth of our work develops.
• Claus: "The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities" (2020). An inspiring and fun survey of cases where evolution gave scientists what they wanted, but not what they needed.
• Gabe: "Geometric Analysis of Shell Coiling: General Problems," by Raup, D. M. (1966). One of my favorite papers of all time. Examines the space of possible forms for coiled shells using mathematical models in comparison with the shells that are found in real life.

Books

• Lana: "The Evolution of Beauty," by R. O. Prum (2017). Examples of environmental fitness losing to mating fitness (aka beauty), without needing the handicap theory. This is your chance to hear about the Sexy Son Hypothesis...
• Mitsuyoshi: "Mortal Game", by Koichi Harukure. The only books I know that truly require artificial life (or cellular automata) are this one and Permutation City by G. Egan! In an interstellar exploration project, an organically emergent cellular automaton is discovered...
• Imy: "Complexity Science: The Study of Emergence" by Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen. A great in-depth introduction to the underlying principles of complexity and emergence across many scales. It offers lots of projects and questions within each chapter. My best book purchase of the year.
• Claus: "Artificial Life: A Report of the Frontier From the Frontier where Computers meet Biology," by Steven Levy (1993). A person-centric review of our field in its early days. It is fun to see what has changed, and what has stayed the same.
• Gabe: "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck. A beautiful story spanning multiple generations. Wonderfully written characters, flawed and human in a way I’ve not often experienced in many other novels.

Entertainment

• Lana: The Dead Planets Society, podcast. What if the Earth was a cube, if the moon had moons that had moons, if... applying real astronomy knowledge to unhinged scenarios.
• Mitsuyoshi: Screeps. A computer game where players deploy bots that autonomously play the game, managing resource metabolism and threats.
• Imy: A series and a movie from the creator of Ghost in the Shell, Masamune Shirow: Appleseed. Stories about genetic engineering, finding out the love of your life has become a cyborg, and just good ol' fashioned futuristic battles with AI overlords. Plus, the art style is beautiful!
• Claus: "Children of Time," by Adrian Tchaikovski (2015): A short sci-fi book about evolution. What else do I need to say? It is wonderful!
• Gabe: John Carpenter’s ``The Thing". My go to movie recommendation. It’s a classic 80s horror with awesome practical effects where you’re always trying to guess who the monster is. Bonus points if you watch it while it’s snowing outside.

Wildcards

• Lana: Greg Egan, That's it. All his stories are great and more often than not, relevant to ALife!
• Mitsuyoshi: Tierra. This simulation exemplifies how simple rules can give rise to intricate ecological dynamics. - Imy: Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast. Incredibly brilliant host who brings on a ton of interesting guests and scholars from many different disciplines.
• Claus: Pico-8: A Fantasy Game Console. It can make not only games, but also cute simulations and it is a great tool for teaching programming. It is also super portable, and has a very friendly community.
• Gabe: Bent’s 2003 album The Everlasting Blink. Amazing album with jazzy samples and the perfect soundtrack for taking a long walk.

Sonobe, Modular Origami

Sonobe is an Origami fold that can be joined with other copies of itself to make complex shapes. The physical edition in ALIFE 2024 included an origami paper piece that you could fold and join with the pieces folded by other alifers. But you can still create your own modular origami following the links below!

*Sonobe folding instructions image by Cmglee, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Follow the instructions in the image above to fold the basic module (steps 1-10). Then you can assemble a pyramid with three modules (steps 11-12). Find ideas for more complex assemblies in this link

About the Artificial Life Newsletter

The Alife Newsletter is a bi-monthly publication that aims to bring interesting news to the Artificial Life community.

The current editors of the newsletter are: - Lana Sinapayen - Imy Khan - Mitsuyoshi Yamazaki - Claus Aranha - Gabriel Severino

The newsletter is sent by e-mail and can also be acessed by RSS. You can subscribe here or follow the RSS feed here.

If you have any suggestions for future content, or would like to help us edit the newsletter, you can leave us a message in the feedback form.

Contributions can be short texts about your own projects, or to boost projects that you like. You can suggest cool papers, books or media to cover. We are specially interested in Master and PhD students who want to talk about their research ideas. Do send us a line!