Stefano Nichele

arxiv.orgBenchmarking the Connectomes of Caenorhabditis elegans within the Reservoir Computing FrameworkThe aim of this work is to examine the connectomes of Caenorhabditis elegans through a computational lens using the reservoir computing framework. Connectomes are mappings of biological neural network...

Does biological wiring make a better reservoir? Our WIVACE 2026 paper benchmarks different C. Elegans connectomes. Randomized baselines often perform better; results depend on the task and configuration. arxiv.org/abs/2609.30508 #ALife #NeuroAI

sco.ltArtificial Life, Intelligence, Complexity & Evolution (ALICE) workshop. Geilo, Norway January 31st to February 5th, 2027 The fields of artificial life, collective intelligence, and evolution, span a wide range of scientific disciplines, yet, they share foundational ideas from complexity science such as self-organisation, network approaches, agentic perspectives, and bio-inspired paradigms of intelligence. The goal of the workshop is to move away from the traditional keynotes format, and instead create a stimulating environment to explore research ideas through discussion groups and projects with the goal of spawning new collaborations. The workshop is open to researchers from PhDs and postdocs to senior researchers. Registration is now open until September 30th: http://aliceworkshop.org

21 Sept

#ALife

Stefano Nichele@stenichele.bsky.social

Happy to share our new paper (led by Etienne Guichard): “Neural Cellular Automata Learn General Features in their Hidden Channels” It will be presented at WIVACE 2026, hosted by the University of Cambridge. arxiv.org/abs/2609.21870

Stefano Nichele reposted

Complexity Digest

@cxdig.bsky.social

21 Sept

Artificial Life, Intelligence, Complexity & Evolution (ALICE) workshop.

21 Sept

sco.ltHiroki Sayama: Evolution and Complexity Growth of Artificial Life in Cellular Automata and Other Discrete Dynamical Systemshttps://vimeo.com/1223515516Binghamton Center of Complex Systems (CoCo) Seminar September 2, 2026 Hiroki Sayama (Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, Binghamton University) "Evolution and Complexity Growth of Artificial Life in Cellular Automata and Other Discrete Dynamical Systems" Watch at: vimeo.com

16 Sept

Join us in Geilo (Norway 🇳🇴)

ALICE Workshop@aliceworkshop.org

We are excited to announce the second edition of the Artificial Life, Intelligence, Complexity & Evolution (ALICE) workshop. ALICE is coming back, this time to Geilo, Norway in the first week of February 2027 🏔️ Details and registration: aliceworkshop.org

Stefano Nichele reposted

Complexity Digest

@cxdig.bsky.social

6 Sept

Hiroki Sayama: Evolution and Complexity Growth of Artificial Life in Cellular Automata and Other Discrete Dynamical Systems

@hirokisayama.bsky.social

23 Aug

#ALIFE2026 in Waterloo (Canada) was a great success! Thanks to all attendees, speakers & local organisers for a fantastic job! Photo from the farewell party with program co-chair Jitka Cejkova & general co-chairs Peter Lewis & Chrystopher Nehaniv. See you in Prague #ALIFE2027

Stefano Nichele reposted

Hiroki Sayama

Imy Khan introducing the Artificial Life Online Expo This is amazing, check it out!! alife-expo.org #ALIFE2026

I enjoyed hosting the Agentic AI as Artificial Life workshop #ALIFE2026. Great talks on safety/security in ecologies of autonomous agents. Thanks to speakers, co-organisers, panelists (Blake Richards - Google, David Bloomin - Softmax, Sushant Gautam - Simula, Ane Espeseth - UiO)

Nice tour of the Waterloo Robot Hub #ALIFE2026

@hirokisayama.bsky.social

At the ALife in the Wild workshop, I have witnessed a presentation by 6 agents living for months on the internet with wallet, email, social media etc & self reported their life. They answer questions on Zoom & Discord. We are moving from AI tools to sovereign agents. #ALIFE2026

Stefano Nichele reposted

Hiroki Sayama

#ALIFE2026 award ceremony -- "Evolution takes multiple paths to evolvability when facing environmental change" receives double awards!! (Each award was discussed and selected independently) www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

On behalf of ISAL @isalofficial.bsky.social, congrats to all awards winners! #ALIFE2026

18 Aug

Tong presenting our paper on "Mass Conservation as an Inductive Bias for Self-Organised Criticality in Neural Cellular Automata Reservoirs" at #ALIFE2026. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2606.23115 @alifeconf.bsky.social

18 Aug

A nice overview of the joint AAMCS and #ALIFE2026 conference

Stefano Nichele reposted

Iliya Zhechev

@ilzhechev.bsky.social

13 Aug

You've heard of Langton's ant. Check out its trainable version. Since it borrows from the architecture of NCAs should we call it Mordvintsev's ant? #ALIFE2026 #ERAWorkshop

nichele.euAgentic and Generative AI as Artificial Life - ALife 2026 Workshop

13 Aug

At our workshop on "Agentic AI as Artificial Life" at ALIFE 2026, we are hosting a panel with: - Blake Richards, Google PI and Mila - Sushant Gautam, Simula - David Bloomin, Softmax - Ane Espeseth, UiO - Stefano Nichele, HiØ (moderator) Join us! www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Agentic/

Stefano Nichele@stenichele.bsky.social

A tentative program for our ALIFE 2026 workhsop on "Agentic and Generative AI as Artificial Life" is out: Website: www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Agentic/ Join us in Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) on August 20th.

3 July

A tentative program for our ALIFE 2026 workhsop on "Agentic and Generative AI as Artificial Life" is out: Website: www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Agentic/ Join us in Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) on August 20th.

Stefano Nichele@stenichele.bsky.social

🦀Call for Contributions – Workshop on Agentic and Generative AI as Artificial Life How can we design agentic AI ecosystems that remain robust, safe, and secure as they become more complex and autonomous? We are inviting contributions to our upcoming workshop: 👉 www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Agentic/

2 July

Check out our new preprint "Conversable Complexity: Agentic LLM Collectives as Interpretable Substrates" Link: arxiv.org/abs/2607.01047

Elias Najarro@najarro.science

Complexity and interpretability rarely coincide: complex systems are usually too opaque to question, while transparent ones are too simple interesting dynamics to emerge. What if we treated LLM agents as the basic computational unit to build agentic substrates? Paper thread 🧵

23 June

Our paper on Mass Conservation as an Inductive Bias for Self-Organized Criticality in Neural Cellular Automata has been accepted at ALIFE 2026 Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2606.23115

arxiv.orgarxiv.org

@craigreynolds.bsky.social

22 June

Jeff is giving a keynote at ALIFE 2026. See you in Waterloo!

ALIFE Conference@alifeconf.bsky.social

We're excited to start unveiling the keynote speakers for #ALIFE2026! First up: Jeff Clune (University of British Columbia), presenting: "Open-Ended, Quality Diversity, and AI-Generating Algorithms in the Era of Foundation Models" Join us in Waterloo, Canada, 17–21 Aug, 2026. 2026.alife.org

Stefano Nichele reposted

Craig Reynolds

17 June

Don't know how often @sethbullock.bsky.social visits here so I wanted to convey his message that our dear friend and ALIFE colleague INMAN HARVEY recently passed away. Follow the link below to Seth's touching post on LinkedIn. #ALIFE

linkedin.comA few days ago I heard that Inman Harvey had died quite suddenly. Inman was a central figure within the international Artificial Life research community and along with a few others helped define the… ...A few days ago I heard that Inman Harvey had died quite suddenly. Inman was a central figure within the international Artificial Life research community and along with a few others helped define the r...

nora.aiNORA Awards 2026: A Celebration of Excellence Across Norwegian AI - NORA - Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research ConsortiumDuring the NORA Annual Conference 2026 in Oslo, we presented our annual awards, recognising outstanding contributions to AI in Norway. The awards honour individuals and organisations that have demonst...

11 June

Coverage of the NORA (Norwegian AI Research Consortium) annual awards 2026, including my award for AI community building and education 🏆 www.nora.ai/news/2026/no...

Stefano Nichele reposted

International Society of Artificial Life (ISAL)

@isalofficial.bsky.social

10 June

We are devastated by the unexpected death of Inman Harvey a few days ago. A towering figure in artificial life and evolutionary robotics for 35 years, he was a mentor, inspiration and friend to generations of Artificial Life researchers. A full obituary will follow.

Stefano Nichele reposted

Lana Sinapayen

@sinalana.eurosky.social

2 June

Replying to @sinalana.eurosky.social

Stefano @stenichele.bsky.social gave a great talk about reimplementing code by Nils Aall Baricelli, the pioneer who ran a self replicating automaton on an early computer while the military wasn't using it at night

nichele.euAgentic and Generative AI as Artificial Life - ALife 2026 Workshop

30 May

*** DEADLINE EXTENSION: June 14th, 2026 *** www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Agentic/

Stefano Nichele@stenichele.bsky.social

21 May

Small experiment on "semantic artificial life". I put small LLMs (Qwen 2.5 0.5B) on a 1D lattice. It is an NCA where update rules are LLMs that receive tokens from left/right neighbors & their previous output and produce new output tokens.

21 May

Will semantic gliders propagate? One cell is initialised with "life finds a way". Outputs: t=1: life starts glowing | new life emerges | life blooms t=15: sunrise brings new hope | nightmares drift softly | new life sprouts eagerly 13 distinct phrases emerge!

Stefano Nichele reposted

ALIFE Conference

@alifeconf.bsky.social

27 Mar

Good news if you’re still finishing your #ALIFE2026 submission! ⏳ Deadline extended to April 12, 2026 (AoE) — final extension. 📌 Submissions are not anonymized this year. 👉 Details & templates on our website. 2026.alife.org

As AI systems become more distributed, emergent, and evolving 🦞 traditional control and verification approaches become insufficient 🦞 raising critical questions about stability, alignment, and resilience 📢 We welcome theoretical, computational, and experimental contributions.

#ArtificialLife #AgenticAI #ComplexSystems #AISafety #AISecurity #Emergence #TrustworthyAI #CallForContributions 🦀 Co-organized with Reiji Suzuki, @kl4sp.bsky.social, Michael Riegler, Kazuya Horibe, Keita Nashimoto

This workshop positions agentic & genAI as a new experimental substrate for ALife research. We aim at exploring how ALife can contribute to the design & governance of increasingly autonomous generative AI ecosystems -& how these systems, in turn, expand the empirical and theoretical scope of ALife.

Stefano Nichele reposted

Lana Sinapayen

@sinalana.eurosky.social

alife.orgNew ISAL Global Membership Program PilotOverview ISAL has core values of being an inclusive and supportive community as well as making the field viable for junior and early career scholars to succeed and thrive in. We recognize that the cos...

The International Society for Artificial Life is offering 5$ memberships to a limited number of people located in low/middle income countries. If you have been interested in the membership benefits (alife.org/membership/) but cannot afford it, apply here: alife.org/2026/03/24/n... #ALife

We are organising the 4th edition of our special session on CA, distributed dynamical systems, and their applications to intelligence. Submit your works and join us at ALIFE 2026 in Waterloo (Canada). bingdev.binghamton.edu/sayama/SS-di...

What can a 70-year-old idea about digital organisms teach us about the future of AI and artificial life? 🧬💡 📄 Read our report: arxiv.org/abs/2603.08463 #ArtificialLife #ComplexSystems #OpenEndedEvolution #ArtificialIntelligence #ALife

Barricelli’s early experiments remind us that artificial life is not only about simulating biology; it may also help us understand how intelligence itself can emerge, scale, and organize collectively.

The report also outlines several directions for future exploration—both conceptually and through new computational substrates. 🚀

🔹 Discussion of symbiogenesis as a mechanism for the origins of life, open-ended evolution, and collective intelligence 🧠

Because the idea that complex intelligence emerges from symbiotic interactions among simpler entities resonates strongly with today’s AI landscape—whether we look at multi-agent systems, neural cellular automata, or evolving neural networks. 🤖

Barricelli’s question was profound: Can complex forms of life emerge from simple computational substrates through cooperation and symbiosis? In our report we explore this question again, combining historical replication with new directions:

🔹 Replication of Barricelli’s original 1D experiments with digital organisms 🔹 Extension to 2D “symbioorganisms”, enabling richer spatial interactions 🌐 🔹 Preliminary experiments with DNA-norms, exploring new evolutionary constraints 🧬

Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life

At the ALICE 2026 workshop in Copenhagen, our group SymBa revisited the pioneering work of Nils Barricelli, who in 1953 explored the symbiogenesis of numerical organisms using one-1D cellular automata— one of the earliest experiments in artificial life & evolutionary computation.

Stefano Nichele reposted

ALIFE Conference

@alifeconf.bsky.social

5 Mar

Submissions for #ALife2026 workshop, tutorial, and spec.session proposals are now closed. Thanks for the great response! Decision letters will be sent soon, and accepted sessions will appear on the website. 👉 2026.alife.org Reminder: the deadline for full papers and extended summaries is March 30.

Stefano Nichele reposted

@eralife.bsky.social

24 Feb

Do you know a student who has published an amazing paper? A veteran professor you admire? Nominate them to win an #ISAL 2026 Award! 🏆 Winners will be announced at @alifeconf.bsky.social ! Want to know more? Check out the form and submit it by March 8 AoE! #ALIFE2026 forms.gle/bkd4ireJSSUc...

24 Feb

Kristine's paper "Information theoretic measures of neural and behavioural coupling predict representational drift" is now available on PLOS Comp. Biology. Link: doi.org/10.1371/jour... This work was led by Kristine (former PhD student) while visiting University of Cambridge during her PhD.