Search, selection, design. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.
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…
Remember the character Ian Malcolm, a polymath chaos theorist played by Jeff Goldblum in the Jurassic Park movies? In the opening pages of The Lost World, Ian Malcolm is giving a talk at the Santa Fe…
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…
Open-endedness is the capacity of a system to keep generating novelty, complexity, and diversity without ever settling into a fixed endpoint. Biological evolution is the reference case: four billion years of…
Open-endedness represents one of the most profound and elusive concepts in computational science, spanning domains from artificial life to creative systems. Rather than focusing on specific algorithms, this…
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…
's requests for startups are always a good place to peek into the zeitgeist (at least the Silicon Valley zeitgeist). A few comments (on things I know a little bit about): #3: the n-of-1 is great on paper…
Some 27 years ago, I was so impressed by Pablo Funes' work (with his PhD advisor the always ideating Jordan Pollack) (P. Funes and J.B. Pollack, “Evolutionary Body Building: Adaptive Physical Designs for…
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…
Fun preprint I just came across through the ICLR 2025 submissions site ( Even though it is still a preprint, there have been extensive reviews. First, I think the authors from Google, Google DeepMind, Google…
I have been thinking a lot about “surprising behavior,” including unintended consequences, from algorithms that rely one way or another on optimization under constraint. That includes a lot of AI models as…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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