Alife News

The Artificial Life Community Newsletter

A Word from the Team

Welcome to the 23rd issue of the ALife Newsletter! We have come to the end of another year, and we hope that 2025 was a good year for you! Accordingly, we dedicate this edition to reflecting on the past, and preparing for the coming year.

So first, we bring to you the results and impressions from the Community Survey we've done earlier this year. What kind of answers did we get from the community? What did we learn? And how do we plan to move forward?

We have also prepared the second ALIFE Advent Calendar. Do you remember the first one in 2023? The theme for the advent calendar this year is Homecoming. From each newsletter editor, we bring three items that connects us to our roots as scientists, as ALifers, and as people. I hope this will be interesting and bring some nice reflections to you too!

The ALIFE Newsletter Community Survey: Numbers

by Lana, Imy, Claus and Martha

Early this year, we conducted a survey to learn who reads the Artificial Life Newsletter, and what they expect from it. Thanks to all of you who contributed to our survey. Your answers have given us a better idea of who is reading the Newsletter, what you like about our work, and how we could improve moving forward. There are many lessons that we can take from your answers to the surveys. Below are some of the things that came to mind as we read up your responses.

Most of our respondents seem to have found us through social media or through our announcements at the ALife conference. We have been slacking a bit on the social media side, but it looks like it's worth putting the effort in!

Email is by far the most common way that you are reading the newsletter. But did you even know we have a RSS feed? We might not have been advertising it enough! It's right here: RSS feed

A surprising number of subscribers read every edition! Or at least, the kind of people who tend to answer our surveys also tend to read every email from us...

Got it: images are important, and so are good titles for our stories. (But we promise not to turn everything into a youtube thumbnail)

One of our main goals with this survey was to learn what you enjoy about the Newsletter, so that we can do more of that. Summing up the different comments that we received, there was an overall theme of "Paper, People and Projects" as things that the readers most liked. We often include a list of interesting papers that we have found, so you can be sure that there will be more featured papers on the newsletter. The "People" part is interesting -- we used to make interviews, but they turned out to be very work intensive, and so we shifted focus to other things. But knowing that this was a favorite part of the newsletter gives us motivation to think of how add interviews again, hopefully without adding too much workload to the editorial team. That includes interviews with individuals, and also features on working groups and laboratories.

(On the other hand, very few people mentioned "book reviews" as one of the thing they liked in the newsletter, which was... interesting ^^;)

Thank you for showing some love to our writing team! We'll keep our text hand typed and AI free then. On a similar topic, some comments that stood out to us were about how the variety of different voices and topics in each edition was a positive point. We are always happy to feature reader suggestions regarding what to cover, so please let us know what you would like to see featured in the newsletter. You may drop us a line using the feeback field at our contribution form.

A common suggestion was to improve the Newsletter design. We will certainly look into reviewing our lovingly hand-crafted CSS, and also, if anyone among the readership has web-design experience, please do contact us!

We are glad to report that our readership is quite varied! Most of you are from outside academia, and within academia we have a good share of students. We will strive to keep our Newsletter full of things that appeal to all ALifers!

Although the Survey is over, we are always interested in hearing the opinions of our readers. Please do feel free to reach to us through social media (or our feedback form) with more comments and ideas about what you want to see in the Artificial Life Newsletter!

The 2025 Artificial Life Holiday Calendar

Do you know of Christmas Advent Calendars? This is a Western tradition where a calendar is prepared with one box for each day of December. Every day, when you open one of the boxes, an enticing surprise is waiting for you: A treat, a message, an image.

With this spirit in mind, we have prepared our own ALIFE Holiday Calendar for you! Every day from today until January 5th, you can click the link below to find a new interesting ALIFE tidbit, brought to you by the ALIFE Newsletter Editors:

The ALIFE Advent Calendar!

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:

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!