Field notes from the edge where human intuition meets machine augmentation. Every post is a star; the lines are the ideas they share. Wander the constellation and let the adjacent possible find you.
These are not silos. A post on foraging ants sits a short edge away from one on search algorithms; a note on olfaction links to one on machine perception. Pick a field, then follow the lines out of it.
Machines that learn
25Working alongside AI
11Search, selection, design
21How living systems change
7Never running out of new
33Many parts, emergent wholes
26Where new things come from
123The machinery of the cell
63Turning science into medicine
12Minds, memory, and bias
16The bandwidth of experience
6How discovery actually works
A cross-section to begin with, including the three interactive pieces: the shapes of scientific discovery, the arithmetic of exploration, and the senses beyond the famous five.
A discovery is not one kind of event. It helps to place any breakthrough on two axes at once: which stage of inquiry it belongs to, and what it does to the surrounding framework. The stage runs from noticing a…
One caveat up front that matters for reading the table: "scout fraction" is not measured the same way across studies — some report a dedicated scout caste, others a trail-lapse rate (foragers that ignore an…
When people say “the five senses,” they usually mean vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. But our bodies actually gather information from the world—and from within ourselves—in many other ways. Below is a…
On Its Head You Can Only Manage What You Can’t Measure Inside the box thinking Why Optimization Is Often Sub-Optimal Simplicity Is Overrated Right-Brain Analytics The New LBO: Left-Brain Outsourcing The Return…
In a recent substack post ( the always insightful Rishad Tobaccowala presents "10 thoughts about AI, Humans and Work in 10 minutes". They are all worth pondering (although I would not invoke Suleyman in 3) but…
In March 2000, Guy Theraulaz and I made the cover of Scientific American for "Swarm Smarts", a sort of companion article to our book with Marco Dorigo, "Swarm Intelligence" ( We were elated, not just for…
The original “fitness beats truth” (FBT) theorems do not require an explicit assumption that “seeking truth is costly.” The key requirement, instead, is that evolution favors any perceptual or cognitive…
Open-endedness represents perhaps the most profound challenge in computational science: how do systems transcend their initial constraints to generate genuinely novel, complex, and meaningful structures? This…
I saw a post by @juergen schmidhuber recently ( that gave me pause. About convolutional neural networks and the neocognitron, a 17-80 neural network architecture by the Japanese scientist Kunihiko Fukushima (…
I was hit hard by learning about Danny Kahneman's very deliberate decision to end his life by assisted suicide in Switzerland last year (Danny's former collaborator on the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and…
A timely review article about “The role of Ultra Processed Foods (UPF) in obesity” (by a team from the University of Sao Paulo and NYU) summarizes a lot of evidence that sounds obvious e.g., diets “high in UPF…
Eli Lilly's Chorus unit, established in 2002, emerged as one of the most successful innovations in pharmaceutical R&D productivity, achieving 3-10x productivity improvements over traditional development models…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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