Many parts, emergent wholes. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.
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 saw a post by Jürgen Schmidhuber recently (all links in comments) that gave me pause . About convolutional neural networks and the neocognitron, a 17-80 neural network architecture by the Japanese scientist…
I love this introduction to scent design by Taylor Rayne at Asimov Press (Scent, in silico, and the role that machine learning and genAI is playing in the field's recent advances: Google DeepMind's Principal…
Alexis de Tocqueville popped up on my LinkedIn feed today and it is amazing how fresh and relevant he is, almost 200 years after writing Democracy in America. One of the most shockingly modern concepts you can…
More on luck and skill, by way of Michael Mauboussin. I would urge anyone interested in this to visit Michael Mauboussin's book website ( for The Success Equation and play with the simulations. In particular,…
There is a fantastic paper that just came out in PNAS, "Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans" (open access!! You may have seen videos in your recent LinkedIn feed comparing a…
Understanding Cognitive Biases Through a Sampling Limitations Framework: A Comprehensive Review and Theoretical Integration Abstract This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical framework that…
A one-way function is a fundamental concept in cryptography that's relatively easy to compute in one direction but extremely difficult to reverse. Let me explain with an example: Think of mixing paint colors -…
Here’s a clear comparison between recall and recognition, showing their differences in task demands and neuro-cognitive mechanisms. 1. Example Tasks Type Example Task Cognitive Demand --- --- --- Free Recall…
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…
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…
Gordon Pask's electrochemical devices represent one of the most remarkable achievements in cybernetics and early artificial life research. Between the 150s and 160s, Pask constructed genuinely self-organizing…
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…
Gordon Pask's electrochemical devices from the 150s and 160s are entirely unique in AI history because they challenged conventional computational orthodoxy by demonstrating that complex intelligence,…
As a 30-year groupie of evolutionary computation, I am particularly sensitive to this trend: evolutionary AI is on the rise. The latest case in point, of course is @google deepmind’s AlphaEvolve, which uses…
I was heartbroken when Harvard Business Review editors decided to title my 2003 article “Don’t Trust Your Gut” ( certainly a buzzier catchphrase than “How To Leverage Your Intuition With Analytics” or other…
Based on the handwritten notes in the image, the text is organized into a large mind map titled "The Future Belongs to Curators". Here is a detailed extraction of all the notes, grouped by their apparent…
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…
My mind was a little bit prepared this time. I love how Ethan Mollick shares his thoughts. And I love Bruce Sterling (the Sci Fi author who asked me a question about heuristocrats at etech 2006, a proud…
In a stimulating post (link in the comments), @bloomberg beta’s @roy bahat highlighted a fascinating 2017 (yes, 8 years ago!) study from this dense urban center that is @the university of Illinois…
That's my favorite quote from Derek Lowe's Science opinion, "The End of Disease". And Derek was kind enough to collect links to all his AI-based drug discovery opinions from the past few years, a treasure…
An article (Open Access! by a team led by Nicholas Christakis at Yale University reports studies of microbiome compositions from 18 isolated villages in Honduras and how they correlate with social interactions…
An intriguing article ("Imbalance in gut microbial interactions as a marker of health and disease", Roberto Corral López, Juan Bonachela, Maria Gloria Dominguez Bello, Michael Manhart, Simon Levin, Martin…
A beloved French TV personality, Bernard Pivot passed away two weeks ago at 8. His literary shows, including his flagships "Apostrophes" and "Bouillon de Culture", were cultural gems, which inspired James…
As we're witnessing generative exaggeration in humans on social media discussing LLM social agents (or artificial social crustaceans as David Ha would put it), a timely article by Walter Quattrociocchi and…
I just came across this fascinating PNAS article by Enrique Muro, Fernando Ballesteros, Bartolo Luque Serrano and Jordi Bascompte, "The emergence of eukaryotes as an evolutionary algorithmic phase transition"…
A great Quanta Magazine article by Gabriel Popkin focuses on how "crowded" and active cells are: "the packing of molecules into tiny spaces is emerging as a fundamental way that cells have evolved to harness…
Now that the article is out and Open Access on Cell, I am reposting a comment I made a few months ago about a super interesting preprint, "How to Build the Virtual Cell with Artificial Intelligence: Priorities…
AI hashtagagents have been around for quite some time ("multi-agent systems" are one classical embodiment), but of course in 2024 hashtagLLM Agents are all the rage. With the explosion of hashtagagentic…
Great article with a misleading title: "A synthetic protein-level neural network in mammalian cells" (Science Magazine: free bioRxiv & medRxiv preprint: The premise that cells are (fast) information-processing…
Thank you Kes Sampanthar for your read on this paper. All the assumptions made by Daron, all the things he neglects, suggest a linear approximation whereby he applies a very short term gradient (most gains…
An exciting article from (the always insightful) Mikhail Belkin and colleagues got its first release in Science Magazine a few days ago (paywall). A preprint version from May 2023 is available ( The main…
Field of view (k): A moderate view size (e.g., k=5) balances environmental awareness and perceptual complexity, optimizing performance for most tasks. Group size (N): Larger groups improve tasks like Transport…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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