Post #366774

I really enjoyed this Artificial Life paper. Beer's lab focuses on finding ways to describe the remarkable things life does in formal terms, and build tools to visualize and analyze them. That's a really cool mission, I think! In this case, the focus is on what makes an individual more or less "viable" or "adaptable" than another one. They did this in a really simple ALife setting based on chemical diffusion. They identified self-sustaining patterns, then tried poking at them to see how much disruption they took to break! What's really cool here is that they started by analyzing a single stable form, then mapped out a network of all the other forms you could reach by nudging the first one. They could quantify how robust each one was to disruption, but also how plastic and persuadable they are, which regions of state space have desirable properties, and how likely agents are to "evolve" into those states by random disruption. The visuals alone are amazing. :) #alife #science