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The Artificial Life Community Newsletter

A Word from the Team

Welcome to the 20th issue of the ALife Newsletter!

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In this edition, we learn about a 13 million Euro push to create a minimal living system, explore a cool interactive website all about Turing machines, and envision systems to light up the space of infinite possible intelligences.

A review of the literature reveals bacteria trained to perform computations, a snapshot of ALife-as-it-was over 20 years ago, and a new class of life that has been colonizing us all along.

In the land of opportunity, the University of Oslo is hiring a postdoc focusing on bio-inspired AI, the Tölvera Python library is accepting applications for Google Summer of Code 2025, and we have a roundup of conferences with active calls. Plus, Jitka Čejková is preparing a book to commemorate 40 years of ALife conferences, to be filled with your stories and memories!

Last, but not least, we are glad to welcome a new member to the ALife Newsletter team: a warm welcome to Martha Emerson!

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 contribution form. We specially appreciate messages from Master and PhD students who want to talk about their recent work. Send us a line! If you got something to share that other ALifers would be interested in, we want to know about it!

Lana, Imy, Mitsuyoshi, Claus, Gabriel and Martha

A Web Introduction to the Turing Machine

shared by Lana

Webpage: https://samwho.dev/turing-machines/

One of the most famous concepts in computer science is the concept of the "Turing machine" and its exciting associate, "Turing completeness". The Game of Life is Turing complete! DNA is a Turing machine! Biology and computers brought together, a topic of interest to ALifers since the beginnings of the field. But wait, what does any of this mean, and why do people get excited about it? Whether you learned about it in school and need a refresher, have never really known what it is and how it relates to Alan Turing, or know exactly what it means and would like to have fun with beautiful, interactive animations, this website is for you. As stated in the introduction,

"By the end of this post, you will know:

screenshot showing an interactive Turing machine

Building Our Way Out: Beyond the Machine Learning Mote

Shared by Jack, Founder, Afhverju Ekki

Jack shares an opinion piece at the Mozilla Foundation Builders project

Picture the space of all possible forms of intelligence. Now zoom in — way in — until you see a tiny mote. That’s where we’re stuck right now: trapped in the speck of machine learning and large language models.

While these tools are impressive, they represent just a fraction of this possibility space. AI discourse risks becoming a closed loop, with concerns about ML’s impact met only with proposals for better ML models, reinforcing our fixation. How do we build outward to see and benefit from intelligence in all its wonderfully diverse embodiments?

€13mn ‘MiniLife’ project aims to create artificial life from scratch

Written by Imy

Can we create life de novo?

This remains one of the grand aims of the artificial life community, both for the study of life-as-it-is, and also for life-as-it-could-be. (Christopher Langton mentioned in his 1989 essay that, "One way to pursue the study of artificial life [is] to attempt to create life in vitro.")

But this is not an easy task, as anyone involved in artificial life will tell you. Since we're still in disagreement about what the minimal conditions would be to call a system "living", and perhaps even less clear on how we would identify that these conditions have been met, it is perhaps no surprise that we don't see many (funded) long-term projects that are driven by the idea of trying to create life from scratch.

Recently, the MiniLife project, led by evolutionary biologist Professor Eörs Szathmary of the Parmenides Foundation along with 3 other PIs, received a 13 million Euro grant by the European Research Council (ERC) to do just that. The six-year project consists of a team of biologists and chemists across a number of universities with the aim of producing metabolically active cells that grow, divide, and evolve within a chemical system.

''Our approach to creating the first artificial chemical living system takes the following steps: (1) Identification of new, and development of existing, autocatalytic (super)systems that function as chemical (and informational) replicators. (2) Coupling of metabolism with chemical replicators. (3) Coupling of autocatalysis to compartment growth and division. (4) Synthesis of a chemical supersystem comprising all three components (replication, metabolism and compartmentalisation). (5) Demonstrating minimal Darwinian evolution upon subjecting the systems synthesized in 1-3 to out-of-equilibrium selection regimes. (6) Approaching a minimal living system by enhancing of the evolvability of the triple systems developed in 4.''

Though many of the news articles of this project are behind paywalls, you can read more details about the project on the Parmenides Foundation website.

Bactoneurons

Shared by Lana

An illustration of two containers with bacteria receiving questions as math problems and "replying" yes or no

Graphical abstract by Sangram Bagh

You may have heard of using computers to simulate bacteria, but have you heard of using bacteria to perform computations? That is what a team at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (!) in India did in this paper.

They created different types of e. coli so that each type could be used to perform one type of computation, and used those bacterial cells to emulate a computational neural network. Chemicals are used as inputs to the network, and the output is read as proteins created by the bacteria. The team managed to solve tasks such as asking whether a small number is prime or not! All hail the bactoneurons.

Hiring: Postdoctoral researcher position in Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence

Shared by Kai Olav Ellefsen, University of Oslo

Links:

Postdoctoral researcher position in Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence for Adaptive and Efficient Robots at the University of Oslo

The position is funded through DSTrain - a 5-year postdoctoral programme that will award 36 postdoctoral fellowship positions of 36 months each in two calls over the programme period within the overarching frame of data science. The programme will train researchers and innovators with disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transferable skills and a foundation in data science methods enabling them to become Europe’s digital leaders across disciplines and sectors.

Salary range: 49.000 - 56.000 EUR depending on qualifications

Tölvera at Google Summer of Code 2025

Shared by Jack Armitage, Tölvera

Tölvera has been accepted to Google Summer of Code 2025, as a sub-organisation under the Python Software Foundation! 🎉

Tölvera is a Python library designed for composing together and interacting with basal agencies, inspired by fields such as artificial life (ALife) and self-organising systems. It provides creative coding-style APIs that allow users to combine and compose various built-in behaviours, such as flocking, slime mold growth, and swarming, and also author their own.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers new contributors over 18 an opportunity to be paid for contributing to an open source project over a three month period.

To find out more and learn how to apply, read Tölvera's GSoC page.

Discussion will take place on the Tölvera Discord's #gsoc channel

Obelisks: A new class in the tree of life

Shared by Lana

Preprint at Biorxiv

Pop-sci writeup at Science alert

obelisk

An analysis of Obelisk Alpha, one of the types of obelisks discovered by the team. Credit: Ivan N. Zheludev, Robert C. Edgar, Maria Jose Lopez-Galiano, Marcos de la Peña, Artem Babaian, Ami S. Bhatt, Andrew Z. Fire

In a preprint published last year, scientists announced that they had found RNA-based elements that, despite having a lot in common with viruses, do not have a protective coating: their RNA is just rolled in the shape of a rod and exposed to the outside world. This makes them an entirely new class of life, right next to viruses and bacteria. The researchers named these rods of RNA "obelisks". While it is unclear what obelisks actually do, they seem to be very numerous and can be found inside the human gut: obelisks were detected in up to 10% of the data analyzed by the research team. Even more striking, once they knew what to look for, the researchers found evidence of obelisk RNA in existing public datasets. What other classes of life could we be missing? And could ALife simulations point out these gaps in our understanding of the tree of life?

Paper Review - Collective Intelligence of the Artificial Life Community on Its Own Successes, Failures, and Future (Rasmussen et al., 2003)

Written by Imy

In a departure from typical ALife research, this paper offers a refreshing introspective view of our field and community, and so I really wanted to bring it to people's attention. Rasmussen et al.'s 2003 study, 'Collective Intelligence of the Artificial Life Community on Its Own Successes, Failures, and Future,' presents a rare qualitative survey of ALife practitioners (specifically, some of the attendees at the Artificial Life VII conference), offering a snapshot of the community's self-perception at the time. Perhaps some of you reading this even remember filling in this survey!

Attendees of the Artificial Life VII conference were asked to complete a web-based survey, seeking to collect their opinions on the successes and failures of ALife as a scientific discipline, as well as the organisation of the wider ALife community. Respondents cited the advancement of bottom-up modeling, sharpening the definition of life, and helping to better understand evolution as some of the main accomplishments of the field, but also voiced concerns regarding the field's overly-theoretical focus, methodological rigor, and lack of connection with other disciplines.

The paper provides a nice historical glimpse into the community's perception of its own maturity and direction, and is certainly worth reading if you're curious to see how the community perceived itself in the early 2000s. Given how much progress we have seen in ALife (both as a field and a community), I (personally) think it would be interesting to replicate this study twenty years on to see how these opinions may have changed.

40 Years of Artificial Life Conferences

By Jitka Cejkova

A colorful banner with the number 40 in red and purple and blue, and the text "Celebrate 40 years of Artificial Life

The first Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems took place in September 1987. The 40th anniversary of the artificial life conference series is approaching! In honor of this milestone, I am planning to prepare a book and would greatly appreciate your help in gathering materials to support its creation or to celebrate the anniversary in another way.

To begin, I would like to ask for your cooperation in identifying which ALIFE or ECAL conferences you attended. If you could kindly mark the relevant conferences in this first simple form, that would be incredibly helpful.

I would also welcome any materials and notes you might have related to these conferences. For this purpose, I’ve prepared this second form. If you could scan or photograph any relevant materials (printed materials, programs, posters, badges, conference gifts, etc.), I would greatly appreciate it. The older, the better! Additionally, your personal stories and memories related to the artificial life community would be of great interest to me. This could include personal anecdotes, key scientific moments, stories about key figures (whether they are still with us or have sadly passed), as well as your overall impressions, experiences, or any memories related to the artificial life field and past conferences.

I would be especially grateful to hear from those of you who are ALIFE "veterans," including organizers or participants from previous years who might be willing to answer follow-up questions.

I would also appreciate it if you could share this call for contribution with your ALIFE colleagues, including retired members or those who were once actively involved in the conferences.

Thank you!

Jitka Čejková

(Education and Outreach Chair of The International Society for Artificial Life)

email: robot100.cz@gmail.com

Conferences and Calls

It's quite a busy time for conference calls at the moment! Here is a short list of conferences and other symposia that have active calls. Special thanks to Eleni Nisioti at IT University of Copenhagen.

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 - Martha Emerson

The newsletter is sent by e-mail and can also be accessed 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. We specially appreciate messages from Master and PhD students who want to talk about their recent work. Send us a line!