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 1979-80 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 1979-80 neural network architecture by the Japanese…
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…
Ali asked for it, here it is. The last 10 years of life are not readily available but I found the last 12 months and the last 3 years healthcare expenditures for a few industrialized countries. 1⃣ First…
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…
Unless we live in a simulation (or if we ourselves are somehow simulations), the following statement should have clear implications for anyone talking about AI having emotions or consciousness (by the always…
Understanding Cognitive Biases Through a Sampling Limitations Framework: A Comprehensive Review and Theoretical Integration Abstract This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical framework that…
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…
The core idea Some processes are easy to run in one direction and hard to run in the other. Mix yellow and blue paint and you get green in a second. Hand someone a can of green paint and ask which yellow and…
School teaches five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The body actually runs many more sensory systems than that, monitoring both the outside world and its own internal state at all times.…
TL;DR: leaderboard rankings are unreliable This picture is worth a t̶h̶o̶u̶s̶a̶n̶d̶ billion words . Based on an preprint on the ArXiv server (The Leaderboard Illusion) by a team led by Shivalika Singh, Marzieh…
Recall and recognition are two ways of retrieving the same stored information, and they differ sharply in how much work they demand. Recall means producing a target from memory with little or no external cue.…
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…
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…
AI agents have been around for quite some time ("multi-agent systems" are one classical embodiment), but of course in 2024 LLM Agents are all the rage. With the explosion of agentic applications and agents'…
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…
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…
) Now for something a bit different for my rabid followers: a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I thought a lot about swarms, real or virtual. And I always had this fantasy of proving that ant…
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…
This guy does not look open-minded. In fact, when this picture was taken, I (yes, it’s me, I haven’t changed a bit) had just started my first semester at École Polytechnique Polytechnique, a French science and…
Of course this caught my attention: LLMs and Swarm Intelligence! According to this study by a team from Renmin University of China, LLMs differ significantly in decentralized swarm scenarios based on their…
The year is 1993, he is a 25-yr-old research engineer at what is now Orange Labs in Brittany, in the Neural Networks team headed by Daniel Collobert (Ronan Collobert’s dad), deeply hidden inside the Flat…
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…
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…
Not only did a certain 2002 paper ( make the list, it turns out to be the most cited article, with more than 6,000 citations as of May 11th, 2024. There is no exciting breakthrough in that paper, no…
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…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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