ECAL 2017, Thursday

Day four of the European Conference of Artificial Life, in Lyon, with a full day of presentations.

Again, the day started with an excellent keynote: Bill Sellers talking on Synthetic palaeontology: Reconstructing Ancient Life using Virtual Robots.  How did dinosaurs walk?  Could they run?  How can we tell when all we have is fossilised bones?  So, the idea is to build a dynamic model in the computer, which can be validated against modern animals like crocodiles and ostriches (although these do have fundamental differences from the original dinosaurs).
Only a feed forward control mechanism is needed in these models. From the dynamic model, it is possible to evolve gaits, and discover how the animals might have moved.  There are constraints that need to be considered, such as bone strength.  This means big dinosaurs probably didn’t run: the bones in their legs would have snapped on impact.  The same technology can be used to investigate the gait of early humans and various hominins, looking at the evolution from a crouched to an upright posture.

After coffee I went to the Morphogenesis session. The talks had a lot of overlap with the Morphogenetic Engineering Workshop on Monday, but added some more detail.

Lunch was organised with special “junior/senior tables” where we oldies got to impart words of wisdom to the up-and-coming generations; or just have a nice chat, actually.

After lunch I went to the session on Applications of ALife, which I was chairing.  Chairing is always a little stressful: you have to listen to the talk in order to have ready a question to ask if no-one else does (but not ask it if there’s a good flow of questions), and also have to timekeep.  The Effects of Environmental Structure on the Evolution of Modularity in a Pattern Classifier was about evolved hierarchical modularity.  Next was EvoMove: Evolutionary-based living musical companion, which I knew something about, since it was an output from the EvoEvo EU project I was involved with (which explains my several previosu trips to Lyon).  The third talk was unfortunetely cancelled, so we had a slightly awkward half-hour break (we don’t move talks around, in case people want to move between sessions).  Finally was Road Detection using Convolutional Neural Networks, spotting the rather ill-defined edges of some narrow roads through countryside.

Then it was off for coffee, followed by the second keynote of the day: Phillippe Faure on Drug addiction and alteration of decision making process.  This was a discussion of a series of complex and subtle experiments on mice and rats, including some that ran for months: how mice balance exploration of their environment with exploitation of resources; how even genetically identical mice have different "personalities"; how their physical and social environment causes individuation; how addiction to eg nicotine also modifies behaviours other than the desire for nicotine, such as favouring immediate reward over uncertainty; and more.  One part I liked was when someone from the audience asked a questions about the difference between reward and punishment: Faure answered about how the mice avoid punishment, but charmingly added “we don’t do those experiments”.

After this was an announcement about next year’s ALife conference in Tokyo.  Then it was the late breaking poster session, accompanied by wine and cheese, which was sufficiently delicious and plentiful that no further meal was needed.  I attended the European Research Council (ERC) grant information session, which introduced me to “Synergy Grants”, which sound ideal for interdisciplinary work (although they do have a success rate of 2%).

ECAL 2017, Monday

Day one of the European Conference of Artificial Life, in Lyon, was dedicated to Workshops and the Summer School.

All the workshops running in parallel meant a tricky choice.  In the morning I went to the (half day) Morphogenetic Engineering Workshop. First we had three plant-inspired talks: on simulating complex ecosystems to investigate the evolution of diversity; on guiding the growth of a system by being inspired by plant growth mechanisms; on real-time interactive systems for biological investigations, based on game engines.  After the break there were three more talks, on using the NEAT encoding scheme to evolve cellular automata rulesets; an investigation into criticality in gene regulatory networks modelled using Random Boolean Networks; a multi-level model of autopoiesis to investigate self-organisation.  So the conference was off to a great start!

After lunch I gave a talk on Open-Endedness in Simulations at the ISAL Summer School.  My very brief abstract: Open-ended behaviour in simulated systems is one goal of artificial life, yet the term “open-ended” is rarely defined. Here I discuss a recent definition in terms of models and meta-models, its consequences for discovering multi-scale open-endedness in computer simulations, and some suggested ways forward.  The talk was based on findings/rants from four recent-ish papers: Reflecting on Open-Ended Evolution (ECAL 2011), Bio-Reflective Architectures for Evolutionary Innovation (ALife 2016), Defining and Simulating Open-Ended Novelty: Requirements, Guidelines, and Challenges (2016), and Semantic closure demonstrated by the evolution of a universal constructor architecture in an artificial chemistry (2017).  Later, a colleague said “I heard you talk on this in Cancun, and thought you were mad.  This time, I think I can see what you are getting at.  Maybe next time I will believe you!”  I suspect this might be partly due to me having had 30 minutes for a highly compressed summary last year, and 90 minutes for a more relaxed approach this time.

I then had the opportunity to drop into the final session of the Living Architectures Workshop. The presentation about the HyperCell project was given via skype, and covered a lot of ground, from a design for the flexible, magnetically connecting “cells” that looked wonderful, to large scale applications for “growing” buildings.

The formal part of the day was completed with a fascinating keynote by André Brack,  Honorary Research Director, CNRS, Center for molecular biophysics, Orleans, France.  The topic was on the origin of life, from Miller & Urey’s now over 60-year-old experiment, to today’s explorations of the solar system, and the possibility of life on exoplanets.  Lots of fascinating chemistry, and delightful anecdotes from a life in science (including, how to get your name on a Science paper by saying “add copper chloride”).

Then it was off to dinner with the other Associate Editors of the Artificial Life journal, for strategy and planning discussions.  I’ve been banging on for years about how important good review articles are to any discipline, so I am now responsible for the reviews part of the journal!

UCNC day 3

UCNC day 3. Well, only half a day, as the afternoon was reserved for exploring Manchester.

We started with a super invited tutorial on “Self-Assembling Adaptive Structures with DNA”, by Rebecca Schulman. Rather than trying to assemble arbitrary structures, let’s just look at what can be done with 1D systems: filaments of DNA nanotubes than can controllably be built into strings, trees, and network structures. She pointed out that it doesn’t make sense to build every structure from weaving pure DNA: a human-size object would need about 3 light years of it. But smaller things can sensibly be built this way. This approach doesn’t include only static structures: movement can be achieved by growing at the front and dissolving at the back. This is the way the cytoskeleton in cells works to move them around. DNA nanotube growth can be controlled by a variety of chemical processes, but it’s hard to design different systems: there’s no good enough model or simulation of how it all works.  Currently things are a mixture of approximate yet expensive simulations, and lab experiments. But this is clearly a very powerful and rich area.

This was followed by the technical session: three talks related to DNA computing. The first was implementing a circuit model in a 2D gellular automaton. Next was another gellular automaton system: a maze solver. We finished the morning with a description of implementing a stack (the push-pop data structure) in DNA: the design is fascinating, and it has been implemented, at least for stack sizes of three. Again, this work is just a hint of things to come.

Then off to explore the wilds of Manchester…

pull to grow

pull it, and it stretches both lengthways and widthways

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a surfeit of caterpillars

Butterflies and nettles go together.  We certainly have the nettles, and now an indication there may be many (Small Tortoishell?) butterflies on the way.

how does your garden grow?

This is so beautiful, and a great idea.  I want one!

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