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

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

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

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...

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 @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

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

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.

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

🦀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/

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

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.

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...

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.

📢 Call for Papers: #ALIFE2026 Waterloo 🇨🇦 & online | 17–21 Aug 2026 📝 Full Papers & Summaries: 30 March 2026 📌 Special Sessions, Workshops & Tutorials proposals: 20 Feb 2026 Theme: Living and Lifelike Complex Adaptive Systems 2026.alife.org

What a week—projects, tutorials, discussion groups, art demo & even a complexity-alife quiz! Thank you to all the attendees who brought a fantastic energy to this year's ALICE workshop. We can't wait to see you again next year, this time in Norway 🇳🇴 Thank you to @aicentre.dk and @itu.dk !

The first month of 2026 has flown by and today we bring you the new monthly #complexitycat thread, where you'll find opportunities that you will fall in love with. 🧵😻 (Keep an eye next week, we'll bring you more.😉)

OT: here's our new baby, basically a third child. His name is Happy, 9 weeks old ❤️

What a great week at the @aliceworkshop.org (Artificial Life, Intelligence, Complexity & Evolution) in Copenhagen. Our multidisciplinary group worked intensely for the whole week and we got the 2nd prize!! Thanks to the amazing organizers from the REAL lab and the jury.

Projects time 👨‍💻👩‍💻🧑‍💻

The panel discussion with all the guests speakers and moderated by Milton Montero & @elisecutts.bsky.social

Day two: tutorials, more discussion groups with @angelgm.bsky.social, @kyrre2000.bsky.social and Alexander Mordvintsev

Discussion groups with @stenichele.bsky.social, @alyssa-m-adams.bsky.social, Susan Stepney & @ericmedvetts.bsky.social

Project pitch time 💡 Great project ideas by attendees and guest speakers @alyssa-m-adams.bsky.social, @angelgm.bsky.social, @stenichele.bsky.social, @kyrre2000.bsky.social, @ericmedvetts.bsky.social, Susan Stepney & Alexander Mordvintsev #ALICEinCopenhagen #ALICE26

Less than a week for ALICE—we are looking forward welcome you all in Copenhagen! ⛄ You can find the updated program here: aliceworkshop.org/program/

Save the date! The annual #Conference on #ArtificialLife - #ALIFE2026 will take place in Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), 17-21 August 2026. More details coming soon!

Check out our new preprint (work led by Andreas Massey) on "Sleep-Based Homeostatic Regularization for Stabilizing Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity in Recurrent Spiking Neural Networks". arxiv.org/abs/2601.08447

Congrats Dr. Tom Glover for a successful PhD defence at OsloMet As a supervisor, it has been a pleasure working with you and learning from you. Thanks to the evaluation committee Kamalika Bhattacharjee, Michele Braccini, and Kazi Shah Nawaz Ripon

Our paper "ARC-NCA: Towards Developmental Solutions to the Abstraction & Reasoning Corpus" has been awarded a Runner-Up #ARCprize Congrats team: E. Guichard, F. Reimers, M. Kvalsund, M. Lepperød, & me Thanks F. Chollet, G. Kamradt, M. Knoop! Paper: etimush.github.io/ARC_NCA/

Proud supervisor announcement: Tom will be defending his PhD on December 17th. Title: “Harvesting the computation of Elementary Cellular Automata with Reservoir Computing” www.oslomet.no/en/about/eve...

I am delighted to have been elected to the Board of Directors of The International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL), together with talented colleagues from around the world. I look forward to serving such a wonderful & diverse community where disciplinary boundaries disappear!

@alife2025.bsky.social was such a blast! Met lots of old and new faces and had very good conversations. Already looking forward to next year in Canada 🍁

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

great opening keynote by Hector Zenil at @alife2025.bsky.social 🇯🇵 the purpose of science (and ALife) is to make sense of patterns in the world

Ready for @alife2025.bsky.social 🇯🇵 Østfold University College is well represented with F. Reimers, C. Vibe, E. Guichard, and me. Check out our 3 presentations at the Distributed Ciphers special session (EngramNCA, ARC-NCA & critical NCA) on Tue & poster session (RBNs for reservoir computing)!

I finally had the time to revise my website with updated descriptions of my research goals and lab activity: www.nichele.eu Feedback is welcome 😄 PS. Is it clear enough that I *DO NOT* focus on artificial intelligence applications? 🧠

Detailed program of the Special Session "The Distributed Ciphers" @alife2025.bsky.social Special session program also available here: www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Distri... The entire program of ALIFE 2025 is available on the conference website: 2025.alife.org/program See you soon in Kyoto 🇯🇵

🔥🔥PhD position alert 🔥🔥 I am looking for a talented PhD student at Østfold University College (Norway) to work on "Open-Ended AI: Novel Methods for Enabling Novelty and Creativity in AI Systems". Apply here: 👇 www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Nice article on Neural Cellular Automata! It also talks about our work on ARC-NCA!

And here are the accepted contributions to the Special Session #TheDistributedCiphers at @alife2025.bsky.social: Details: www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Distri... See you in Kyoto 🇯🇵

Presentation of our work on "NCAs for memory transfer + application to ARC-AGI", given at the computational series of the #Levin Lab at Tufts & Harvard Universities. Thanks M. Levin for the kind invitation & special thanks to Etienne for presenting our work. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyc0...

A great review on Module Repetition in Neural Networks, very relevant for NCAs arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12473

Check out our new work on Critical Neural Cellular Automata 👇

We are happy to announce that @alyssa-m-adams.bsky.social will give a keynote at our Distributed Ciphers Special Session at @alife2025.bsky.social Kyoto (Oct. 6-10) #ALIFE2025 Alyssa's talk: ⭐ What Fungi, Swarms, and Cellular Automata Are Teaching Us About Intelligence ⭐

I've finally got a copy of Nils Barricelli's 1st paper on Artificial Life, in Italian (1954). Would be great to get it translated into English. My preference would be to have this done by a skilled human translator rather than AI. Any bilingual Italian-English folk out there who might be interested?

Your brain doesn’t just passively track time ⏳ - it structures it. In @Science.org we show that activity in 🧠 memory circuits (LEC) drifts constantly, but makes sharp jumps at key moments, segmenting life into meaningful events. (1/2) 👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Synthetic ecosystems that autonomously and continuously evolve in silico 👾 An Alifer dream we pursue with Flow-Lenia, a mass-conservative continuous CA ! If you are interested in complex systems with (1) emergent creatures and (2) intrinsic evolutionary dynamics, go check our new paper ! A 🧵