Sebastian Risi

@risi.bsky.social keynoting IEEE CoG, and asking whether we now have the ingredients we need to create a new Creatures (the revolutionary artificial life game from the 90s) but where the creatures actually think

🤖 🧠 🧪 New paper! I'm presenting it TOMORROW at #ALIFE2026! What if a chip could heal itself the way a brain does: not with a spare part, but by rewiring around the wound? Meet Self-Organising Digital Circuits. 👉 self-organising-circuits.github.io/ (go murder some logic gates, I'll explain) 🧵⬇️

Link to pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2607.01047 Joint work with Ane Espeseth, Eleni Nisioti, @risi.bsky.social and @stenichele.bsky.social

The AI Picbreeder Experiment: Can AI agents be creative when nobody tells them what to create? Blog: pub.sakana.ai/picbreeder-vlm Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2605.23908 In our #GECCO2026 paper, we revisit Picbreeder, a website where people collaboratively evolved images without any predefined objective.

I’m proud to be part of this work, led by my PhD student @smearle.bsky.social and supervised by @risi.bsky.social. The question we ask is whether modern VLMs can exhibit the same kind of open-ended search and invention as humans when placed in the same mechanism

My PhD student @smearle.bsky.social very successfully defended his thesis today, in front of a committee consisting of @eugenerobinson.bsky.social @risi.bsky.social Tim Rocktäschel and @phillipisola.bsky.social . Next post: link to a recording of his defense talk

New research out — A developmental model with morphogenetic scaffoldings to guide self-organisation: a single model, many grown patterns. The memory-compute trade-off but in self-organizing systems. A collab featuring @najarro.science, Jakob Schauser and @risi.bsky.social and yours truly

📖 Free open-access edition: neuroevolutionbook.com

Excited to announce our book “Neuroevolution: Harnessing Creativity in AI Agent Design” by Sebastian Risi, Yujin Tang, Risto Miikkulainen, and myself. We explore decades of work on evolving intelligent agents and shows how neuroevolution can drive creativity in deep learning, RL, LLMs and AI Agents!

Kan naturens egen designproces videreudvikle AI? En ny lærebog skrevet af ITU-professor @risi.bsky.social m.fl. udforsker feltet 𝙉𝙚𝙪𝙧𝙤𝙚𝙫𝙤𝙡𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣, der kan ændre fremtidens kunstige intelligens. "Grundideen er at efterligne, hvordan intelligens opstod i naturen." Læs mere 👉 itu.dk/Om-ITU/Press...

This year's ALICE guest speakers 🧑‍🔬 - Angel Goñi-Moreno - @angelgm.bsky.social - Alyssa Adams - @alyssa-m-adams.bsky.social - Alexander Mordvintsev - Eric Medvet - @ericmedvetts.bsky.social - Kyrre Glette - @kyrre2000.bsky.social - Stefano Nichele - @stenichele.bsky.social - Susan Stepney

Our (in the making) paper combining morphogenetic fields and neural cellular cellular automata with @miltonllera.bsky.social, Eleni Nisioti & @risi.bsky.social got a little award at @alife2025.bsky.social #ALife2025 💮✨

The SONI session turned out a great—shout out to the speakers & the panelists @emilydolson.bsky.social, @risi.bsky.social, @blaiseaguera.bsky.social & Sidney Pontes-Filho for great talks & discussion on how we can rethink intelligence under the complexity lens. #ALife2025 @alife2025.bsky.social

If you are attending @alife2025.bsky.social next week you shouldn’t miss our workshop on Monday! Besides the opportunity to share an exciting idea or a (research) project you’ve been working on, we’ll have talks by @risi.bsky.social and @bhartl.bsky.social giving some career insights. 😮 #ALIFE2025

We are excited to announce the Artificial Life, Intelligence, Complexity & Evolution (𝗔𝗟𝗜𝗖𝗘) workshop. This first edition will be hosted in Copenhagen on the first week of February. We will soon be announcing the guest speakers—Stay tuned! Check our website for more information: aliceworkshop.org

We're excited to announce final program of the @alife2025.bsky.social SONI session which will host a panel discussion with @blaiseaguera.bsky.social, @risi.bsky.social, @emilydolson.bsky.social & Sidney Pontes-Filho Check out the full program: sites.google.com/view/soni-al... See you in Kyoto ⛩️

The @alife2025.bsky.social deadline has been extended one week—new deadline May 11th 2025 23:59 AoE Join us in Kyoto for #ALife2025 🎏

Announcing SONI: Self-Organising Neural Intelligence(s) 🧠 An #ALife2025 special session to bring together AI & ALife communities to explore how self-organisation can contribute to neural paradigms of intelligence. Call for papers sites.google.com/view/soni-al... |Submission deadline: May 4th

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnoa... Bio-Inspired Plastic Neural Nets that continually adapt their own synaptic strengths can make for extremely robust locomotion policies! Trained exclusively in simulation, the plastic networks transfer easily to the real world, even under various extra OOD situations.

Join us for the Evolving Self-Organisation workshop at #GECCO this year! Great chance to submit your favourite ideas concerning self-organisation processes and evolution, and how they interact. Relevant for Alifers #ALife and anyone interested in #evolution, #self-organisation, and #ComplexSystems.

See you in Vancouver!

Hi, I'm Joachim, I work as a postdoc on the Grow-AI project lead by @risi.bsky.social at ITU of CPH. My PhD is titled "Bio-Inspired Approaches to Adaptive Artificial Agents" and since then, a lot of my time has revolved around Neural Developmental Programs: watermark.silverchair.com/isal_a_00755...

This may sound odd, but game-based benchmarks are some of the most useful for AI, since we have human scores and they require reasoning, planning & vision The hardest of all is Nethack. No AI is close, and I suspect that an AI that can fairly win/ascend would need to be AGI-ish. Paper: balrogai.com

Now that @jeffclune.bsky.social and @joelbot3000.bsky.social are here, time for an Open-Endedness starter pack. go.bsky.app/MdVxrtD

Do babies pretrain? www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Hello Bluesky 🦋 We are the REAL Lab. We work on Robotics, Evolution and Artificial Life at #ITU in #Copenhagen Follow, cite & subscribe for more news on our research 🤖

You can follow our group members here: go.bsky.app/6ZKFVmQ

GROW-AI writing retreat ✍️ Trying to figure out our perspective on evolutionary developmental artificial intelligence 🧬

Soon: neuroevolutionbook.com