Artificial Life Research Articles

From Chaos to the Absurd: Existentialism for the 21st Century

As Sartre pointed out, philosophical questions are questions that each generation must ask themselves because only this promotes the feeling of being alive, which is especially true for existential questions closely related to time–space, the moment, and our society. Sartre placed his philosophy of existentialism in wartime and the social conditions of the time at the beginning of the 20th century. We can equate these conditions with today’s conditions; we are once again facing threats of war, and once again, we are facing chaotic conditions that increasingly lead to absurdity but are also entirely different. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the clarity and disambiguation of the 20th century no longer exist, as the relationships between beings and the world have drastically changed. We can observe that (1) the world is not one; there are two worlds, the physical and the cyber world and (2) being is not one; there are two beings (entities), human and AI-based forms of artificial life (ALF), between which there is a permanent tension. We advocate the thesis that in the society of the future, man must still play a master role; he must still be the being who will guide this society. Also, as Sartre claimed, each era must create its philosophy and consider real time–space. Responses to changes in this time–space also relate to existentialism in the 21st century. In this context, it is necessary to redefine the view of the future and the guidelines for the development of future society.

Survival and Evolutionary Adaptation of Populations Under Disruptive Habitat Change: A Study With Darwinian Cellular Automata.

The evolution of living beings with continuous and consistent progress toward adaptation and ways to model evolution along principles as close as possible to Darwin's are important areas of focus in Artificial Life. Though genetic algorithms and evolutionary strategies are good methods for modeling selection, crossover, and mutation, biological systems are undeniably spatially distributed processes in which living organisms interact with locally available individuals rather than with the entire population at once. This work presents a model for the survival of organisms during a change in the environment to a less favorable one, putting them at risk of extinction, such as many organisms experience today under climate change or local habitat loss or fragmentation. Local spatial structure of resources and environmental quality also impacts the capacity of an evolving population to adapt. The problem is considered on a probabilistic cellular automaton with update rules based on the principles of genetic algorithms. To carry out simulations according to the described model, the Darwinian cellular automata are introduced, and the software has been designed with the code available open source. An experimental evaluation of the behavioral characteristics of the model was carried out, completed by a critical evaluation of the results obtained, parametrically describing conditions and thresholds under which extinction or survival of the population may occur.

(A)Life as It Could Be.

On this 30th anniversary of the founding of the Artificial Life journal, I share some personal reflections on my own history of engagement with the field, my own particular assessment of its current status, and my vision for its future development. At the very least, I hope to stimulate some necessary critical conversations about the field of Artificial Life and where it is going.

Redesign of a virtual reality basic life support module for medical training – a feasibility study

BackgroundHealthcare providers, including medical students, should maintain their basic life support (BLS) skills and be able to perform BLS in case of cardiac arrest. Research shows that the use of virtual reality (VR) has advantages such as improved accessibility, practice with lifelike situations, and real-time feedback during individual training sessions. A VR BLS module incorporating these advantages, called Virtual Life Support, has been developed especially for the medical domain. Virtual Life Support was collaboratively developed by software developers and stakeholders within the field of medical education. For this study, we explored whether the first version of this module capitalised on the advantages of VR and aimed to develop an understanding of barriers to feasibility of use.MethodsThis study was conducted to assess the feasibility of employing Virtual Life Support for medical training and pinpoint potential obstacles. Four groups of stakeholders were included through purposive sampling: physicians, BLS instructors, educational experts, and medical students. Participants performed BLS on a BLS mannequin while using Virtual Life Support and were interviewed directly afterwards using semi-structured questions. The data was coded and analysed using thematic analysis.ResultsThematic saturation was reached after seventeen interviews were conducted. The codes were categorised into four themes: introduction, content, applicability, and acceptability/tolerability. Sixteen barriers for the use of Virtual Life Support were found and subsequently categorised into must-have (restraining function, i.e. necessary to address) and nice to have features (non-essential elements to consider addressing).ConclusionThe study offers valuable insights into redesigning Virtual Life Support for Basic Life Support training, specifically tailored for medical students and healthcare providers, using a primarily qualitative approach. The findings suggest that the benefits of virtual reality, such as enhanced realism and immersive learning, can be effectively integrated into a single training module. Further development and validation of VR BLS modules, such as the one evaluated in this study, have the potential to revolutionise BLS training. This could significantly improve both the quality of skills and the accessibility of training, ultimately enhancing preparedness for real-life emergency scenarios.

Self-Reproduction and Evolution in Cellular Automata: 25 Years After Evoloops.

The year 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of evoloops, an evolutionary variant of Chris Langton's self-reproducing loops, which proved constructively that Darwinian evolution of self-reproducing organisms by variation and natural selection is possible within deterministic cellular automata. Over the last few decades, this line of Artificial Life research has since undergone several important developments. Although it experienced a relative dormancy of activity for a while, the recent rise of interest in open-ended evolution and the success of continuous cellular automata models have brought researchers' attention back to how to make spatiotemporal patterns self-reproduce and evolve within spatially distributed computational media. This article provides a review of the relevant literature on this topic over the past 25 years and highlights the major accomplishments made so far, the challenges being faced, and promising future research directions.

열린 메타버스 도시의 윤리 : ‘메타버스 스마트’ - 리처드 세넷의 『짓기와 거주하기』를 중심으로

All forms of cities are inherently in conflict between construction and residence, and in that the metaverse takes all elements in an open form in the process of transcending the actual city, the virtual city is a reflection of the ‘ethics of the open city’ advocated by Richard Sennett. A city is composed of a ‘ville’ as a physical place and a ‘cité’ as a mental place, and an open ville is important for residents to actively intervene in the city. Through open practices in an open city, residents evolve into ‘street smarts.’ The metaverse city is also composed of a ville and a city, but unlike a real city, it is characterized by having a ville that can change flexibly. ‘Vehicles (mobility)’ that help with open practices such as walking and squinting, and ‘role play’ through titles or occupations help metaverse users explore a variety of lives in the virtual city. Just like street smarts are residents who show competence in real cities, those who build their own knowledge system based on their experience and accumulation of metaverse cities and endlessly differentiate themselves in virtual life can be called 'metaverse smarts'. Metaverse Smarts is created by the interdependent relationship between individual non-linearity and social commons.

The Second Life Metaverse and Its Usefulness in Medical Education After a Quarter of a Century.

The immersive virtual world platform Second Life (SL) was conceived 25 years ago, when Philip Rosedale founded Linden Lab in 1999 with the intention of developing computing hardware that would allow people to immerse themselves in a virtual world. This initial effort was transformed 4 years later into SL, a universally accessible virtual world centered on the user, with commercial transactions and even its own virtual currency, which fully connects with the concept of the metaverse, recently repopularized after the statements of the chief executive officer of Meta (formerly Facebook) in October 2021. SL is considered the best known virtual environment among higher education professionals. This paper aimed to review medical education in the SL metaverse; its evolution; and its possibilities, limitations, and future perspectives, focusing especially on medical education experiences during undergraduate, residency, and continuing medical education. The concept of the metaverse and virtual worlds was described, making special reference to SL and its conceptual philosophy, historical evolution, and technical aspects and capabilities for higher education. A narrative review of the existing literature was performed, including at the same time a point of view from our teaching team after an uninterrupted practical experience of undergraduate and postgraduate medical education in the last 13 years with >4000 users and >10 publications on the subject. From an educational point of view, SL has the advantages of being available 24/7 and creating in the student the important feeling of "being there" and of copresence. This, together with the reproduction of the 3D world, real-time interaction, and the quality of voice communication, makes the immersive experiences unique, generating engagement and a fluid interrelation of students with each other and with their teachers. Various groups of researchers in medical education have developed experiences during these years, which have shown that courses, seminars, workshops and conferences, problem-based learning experiences, evaluations, teamwork, gamification, medical simulation, and virtual objective structured clinical examinations can be successfully carried out. Acceptance from students and faculty is generally positive, recognizing its usefulness for undergraduate medical education and continuing medical education. In the 25 years since its conception, SL has proven to be a virtual platform that connects with the concept of the metaverse, an interconnected, open, and globally accessible system that all humans can access to socialize or share products for free or using a virtual currency. SL remains active and technologically improved since its creation. It is necessary to continue carrying out educational experiences, outlining the organization, objectives, and content and measuring the actual educational impact to make SL a tool of more universal use.

Assemblage Robotic Plants: Individualizations of Many Orders of Magnitude

Abstract This paper focuses on the author’s artistic practice and presents robotic plant creations as assemblages using robotic autonomy unities in a Small-World Network configuration. This artistic production is significantly founded on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophical concepts about Technological Beings. Understanding these communities of robotic structures as individualizations is critical to apprehending them as individuals. The paper also discusses the implications of hardware design, coding, and the concept of artificial life related to the development of such technological organisms.

A template for artificial life.

A template for artificial life.

Lexical-and-Semantic Field “New Sincerity”: Neologisms in Russian and Chinese Media Discourse

The ideographic description of new vocabulary and the linguistic units within the lexical-and-semantic field of the idiom new sincerity in particular, is being considered. It is noted that in addition to its cultural significance, this expression has also acquired two new meanings: marketing technology and communicative practice. It is precisely in these meanings that the idiom new sincerity is studied in this research. Using component, contextual, and interpretive methods of analysis, with the support of the ideographic dictionary compiled by one of the authors and examples of usage in media discourse texts, the vocabulary within the lexical-and-semantic field of “new sincerity” has been identified and described. Most of the linguistic units in this group have been established to be neologisms. The presented ideographic network has a frame structure and reflects the fragments of modern reality represented in the linguistic worldview by new vocabulary. The authors have identified 5 segments (slots) of the ideographic network: “new sincerity” as a tactic in internet communication, social-and-political communication, as a basis for uniting people, a form of expressing aggression, and as a communicative practice in the conditions of the coronavirus pandemic. Each segment includes a set of ideograms that unite lexical representatives – neologisms. It is noted that the expression new sincerity is not used in Chinese media texts. However, there has been an increasing interest in open expression of feelings and sharing personal stories by participants in modern Chinese shows, which corresponds to the practice of “new sincerity” in virtual and real life.

AN AI INFLUENCED SOCIAL CONTRACT: AN ILLUSTRATION OF AMERICAN CONSTITUTION

This research was intended to highlight how the latest technologies like social media and virtual reality (VR) have influenced upon basic principles of current democratic political system, which includes individual freedom, freedom of speech and individual privacy. Hence, this research has illustrated few constitutional articles of first formally documented social contract- An American constitution. The research explained the need to change the three articles including the first and fourth amendment of “Bill of rights” and section one of the 14th amendment. By that means, the researcher concluded at the end that, if the concept of social contract has to be relevant then it must include terminologies like virtual life, virtual freedom, virtual property, virtual security and virtual establishment in at least those three mentioned constitutional articles. Moreover, the articles were actually enacted in the era when only physical life and property were needed to be secured form external attacks but, the new technologies have changed that landscape. Hence, it is the need of the time to alter the founding principles of American constitution in order to provide safe, secure and peaceful internal and external environment to the American populace.

Deep learning for ultrasound medical images: artificial life variant

Deep learning for ultrasound medical images: artificial life variant

From Monsters to Mazes: Sociotechnical Imaginaries of AI Between Frankenstein and Kafka

The emergence of ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools (GenAI) capable of producing human-like texts sparked debates concerning whether we are at the dawn of a new age of writing and meaning-making. Rather than weighing in on the potential impact of GenAI, this paper engages with the implicit sociotechnical imaginaries underpinning reactions to GenAI. One particularly evocative source for sociotechnical imaginaries are fictional texts, which can shape our shared imagination of possible and probable futures. Accordingly, I analyze two seminal works of fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Planet eBooks, 1818) and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Echo Library, 1925). Frankenstein is regarded as an enduring myth that has shaped perceptions of artificial life. This paper sets out to explore the limitations of the ‘Frankensteinian sociotechnical imaginary’ by unpacking AI’s assumed modes of meaning-making along three axes: (1) agency, (2) relations, and (3) control. Within the Frankensteinian sociotechnical imaginary, AI is approached in anthropomorphic terms, emphasizing the struggle over control of meaning-making without reshaping its overarching logic. The Trial, in contrast, offers a lens that challenges common dichotomies underpinning the Frankenstein model: (1) highlighting the entanglement between AI and human intentionality in processes of meaning-making, (2) exploring human-AI relations as recursively shaped through the complementary tendency of humans and GenAI to generate and infer meaning, and (3) shifting the notion of control from a struggle over domination to an emphasis on how GenAI concurrently expands the available choices while limiting humans’ influence over patterns of meaning-making.

Aggregate Boid behavior to aid in artificial autopoietic organization

Analyzing carbon-based life on earth can lead to biased inferences on the nature of life as might exist in elsewhere in the universe in alternative forms, therefore, scientists have looked into either abstracting life into constituent systems it is comprised of, or logics of life, or lists of essential criteria, or essential dynamic patterning that characterizes the living. A system-level characterization that is and referred to as a general pattern of minimal life is autopoiesis (Varela et al., 1974) including production, maintenance and replacement of required constituents for setting up and maintaining an internal environment with self/other separation that regulates and is constitutive of processes that produce the environment and components for processes that comprise this ongoing activity of self-production in ‘recursively’, i.e., in a manner that allows the organizational pattern to continually reconstitute the conditions, components and processes required for its own perpetuation. This seminal concept of an autopoiesis is instantiated in life as we know it, but might also be instantiated in different media and in unforeseen ways. Other researchers have argued life is more than autopoiesis and that it is a co-emergent property of autopoiesis and cognition. Life produces many emergent properties such as synchronization and patterns as seen in flocks and herds of different animal species. The mechanics of this synchrony displayed in flocks and herd animals has been extracted by Craig Reynolds into a generative model referred to as “Boids”. With these concepts in mind, we address the following research question: How can the synchronous maneuvers and aggregate behavior of Boids contribute to constitutive subsystems in realizing an autopoietic system? Can such a system exhibit minimal cognition? This work attempts to answer these questions with a bottom-up approach to constructing an artificial life system. We exhibit a computational model of autopoiesis and a minimal level of cognition in the sense of M. Bitbol and P. Luigi Luisi, whereby an autopoietic entity engages in active assimilation of external components as part of its activity of self-production.

Emergence and Criticality in Spatiotemporal Synchronization: The Complementarity Model.

This work concerns the long-term collective excitability properties and the statistical analysis of the critical events displayed by a recently introduced spatiotemporal many-body model, proposed as a new paradigm for Artificial Life. Numerical simulations show that excitable collective structures emerge in the form of dynamic networks, created by bursts of spatiotemporal activity (avalanches) at the edge of a synchronization phase transition. The spatiotemporal dynamics is portraited by a movie and quantified by time varying collective parameters, showing that the dynamic networks undergo a "life cycle," made of self-creation, homeostasis, and self-destruction. The power spectra of the collective parameters show 1/f power law tails. The statistical properties of the avalanches, evaluated in terms of size and duration, show power laws with characteristic exponents in agreement with those values experimentally found in the neural networks literature. The mechanism underlying avalanches is argued in terms of local-to-collective excitability. The connections that link the present work to self-organized criticality, neural networks, and Artificial Life are discussed.

#1563 Family feedback survey on quality of dialysis withdrawal and end-of-life care on hemodialysis patients in an ICU – a single-center study from India

Abstract Background and Aims End-of-life care in hemodialysis is emerging, with limited implementation in developing countries. There is a sparsity of data on dialysis withdrawal and the quality of end-of-life care in these regions. Developing countries differ in their cultural, social, and spiritual practice compared to the Western world and family plays a major role in decision-making. No survey has been done on family's perception of dialysis withdrawal and end-of-life care in our settings. So, we studied feedback from families regarding the quality of dialysis withdrawal and end-of-life care provided to maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) patients admitted to our intensive care unit (ICU). Method This study was conducted at Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, MAHE, Manipal, India between January 2020 to October 2022 involving the data from end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) patients on MHD admitted in the ICU, who had withdrawn from dialysis before death and received end-of-life care as per the hospital policy (Blue Maple) from Renal supportive and Palliative care team. The baseline data was collected for all patients and indications for withdrawal of dialysis and ICU treatment and end-of-life care provided were collected. The next of kin were interviewed by telephone by a single interviewer using a modified Quality of Death and Dying questionnaire. The data was analyzed using SPSS 20 Results Among 98 ESKD patients on maintenance hemodialysis who died in our ICU, 23 were referred to Palliative care, counselled, had withdrawal of dialysis at least 48 hours before death and received end-of-life care. Table 1 outlines baseline characteristics. The mean age was 57 ± 12.09 years, with a male predominance (82.6%). Common comorbidities included hypertension (100%), type 2 diabetes (69.5%), and ischemic heart disease (65.2%). The primary cause for ICU admission was infectious disease (47.8%). The majority of reasons for dialysis withdrawal and end-of-life care were worsening hemodynamic status (82.6%) and illness deterioration (69.5%). After consent and establishment of futility, dialysis withdrawal was done for all patients (100%), No CPR for 100%, withdrawal of inotropes in 50%, and withdrawal of ventilator was done in 80% of the patients. A successful telephonic interview/survey was conducted with 21 out of the 23 subjects, with the majority of next of kin being the spouse (47.6%) followed by children (33.3%) and siblings (14.3%). The questionnaire and response are given in Table 2. All expressed a need for palliative care involvement. 82% accepted the decision of dialysis withdrawal and end-of-life care put forth by the doctor's team without difficulty;74% of families were present with the patient in their final hours and were grateful for the same 20% had their spiritual leader to visit during the end-of-life event. None of the family members (100%) interviewed had a guilty feeling and all had a positive rating on the involvement of the palliative care team and the need to ease patients' distress and suffering during their final hours (100%). Unfortunately, none of the patients had prior discussions of advance care planning (ACP) with their doctors regarding end-of-life care before the specific event Conclusion Our study highlights that families agree with the withdrawal of artificial life support measures, such as MHD, CPR, withdrawal of inotropes, and/withdrawal of ventilator in ICU settings when these interventions are considered futile for end-of-life care in ESKD patients. It also emphasizes the need for ACP, and early integration of palliative care for discussions about dialysis withdrawal, and withholding futile interventions at end-of-life care in ESKD patients, especially in resource-constrained settings like ours, for high-quality end-of-life care. This will also lead to better end-of-life care outcomes and improved patient and family satisfaction with care.

Spatial interactions modulate tumor growth and immune infiltration.

Lenia, a cellular automata framework used in artificial life, provides a natural setting to implement mathematical models of cancer incorporating features such as morphogenesis, homeostasis, motility, reproduction, growth, stimuli response, evolvability, and adaptation. Historically, agent-based models of cancer progression have been constructed with rules that govern birth, death and migration, with attempts to map local rules to emergent global growth dynamics. In contrast, Lenia provides a flexible framework for considering a spectrum of local (cell-scale) to global (tumor-scale) dynamics by defining an interaction kernel governing density-dependent growth dynamics. Lenia can recapitulate a range of cancer model classifications including local or global, deterministic or stochastic, non-spatial or spatial, single or multi-population, and off or on-lattice. Lenia is subsequently used to develop data-informed models of 1) single-population growth dynamics, 2) multi-population cell-cell competition models, and 3) cell migration or chemotaxis. Mathematical modeling provides important mechanistic insights. First, short-range interaction kernels provide a mechanism for tumor cell survival under conditions with strong Allee effects. Next, we find that asymmetric interaction tumor-immune kernels lead to poor immune response. Finally, modeling recapitulates immune-ECM interactions where patterns of collagen formation provide immune protection, indicated by an emergent inverse relationship between disease stage and immune coverage.

Participatory design of a virtual reality life review therapy system for palliative care

We present a novel Virtual Reality (VR) life review therapy system. Life review therapy is an intervention used by clinical psychologists, counselors, and social workers for patients under palliative care to systematically examine various life experiences to resolve conflicts and complete life tasks. The goal of the therapy is to narrativize the patient’s life before death in order to come to terms with their mortality. Our VR life review therapy system allows therapists to perform their interventions in customized virtual spaces designed to encourage the patient to reflect and reminisce about their life experiences. Our system is also developed in response to mobility restrictions and COVID-19 pandemic-related quarantine measures that have separated patients under palliative care from family and friends, resulting in emotional and psychological distress. As VR systems related to health are increasingly being used by therapists in their interventions, it is of utmost importance that the health professionals who will be the end users of these systems are involved in the design process to create ethical healthcare technologies. In response, we initiated the participatory design and evaluation of our VR life review therapy system prototype with six clinical psychologists who have practical experience delivering life review therapy to patients in palliative care in the Hong Kong hospital system. In the study, each participant experienced the VR life review therapy system and evaluated its strengths and weaknesses through semi-structured interviews. The qualitative data gathered from these interviews was coded according to nine different categories; avatars, content design, evaluation, haptic sensations, interaction, gesturing and gaze direction, movement and navigation, non-verbal communication, soundtrack. These conceptual categories were chosen based on our analysis of common themes reported by the clinical psychologists’ experience of the system. Feedback from clinical psychologists on each of these categories was incorporated into the redesign and update of the final system. Overall, participants generally evaluated the system as feasible and effective for use with patients under palliative care, while movement and interaction were the features requiring the most improvement.

The Ethics of Life as It Could Be: Do We Have Moral Obligations to Artificial Life?

The field of Artificial Life studies the nature of the living state by modeling and synthesizing living systems. Such systems, under certain conditions, may come to deserve moral consideration similar to that given to nonhuman vertebrates or even human beings. The fact that these systems are nonhuman and evolve in a potentially radically different substrate should not be seen as an insurmountable obstacle to their potentially having rights, if they are sufficiently sophisticated in other respects. Nor should the fact that they owe their existence to us be seen as reducing their status as targets of moral concern. On the contrary, creators of Artificial Life may have special obligations to their creations, resembling those of an owner to their pet or a parent to their child. For a field that aims to create artificial life-forms with increasing levels of sophistication, it is crucial to consider the possible ethical implications of our activities, with an eye toward assessing potential moral obligations for which we should be prepared. If Artificial Life is larger than life, then the ethics of artificial beings should be larger than human ethics.

Pressure-Based Soft Agents.

Biological agents have bodies that are composed mostly of soft tissue. Researchers have resorted to soft bodies to investigate Artificial Life (ALife)-related questions; similarly, a new era of soft-bodied robots has just begun. Nevertheless, because of their infinite degrees of freedom, soft bodies pose unique challenges in terms of simulation, control, and optimization. Herein I propose a novel soft-bodied agents formalism, namely, pressure-based soft agents (PSAs): spring-mass membranes containing a pressurized medium. Pressure endows the agents with structure, while springs and masses simulate softness and allow the agents to assume a large gamut of shapes. PSAs actuate both locally, by changing the resting lengths of springs, and globally, by modulating global pressure. I optimize the controller of PSAs for a locomotion task on hilly terrain, an escape task from a cage, and an object manipulation task. The results suggest that PSAs are indeed effective at the tasks, especially those requiring a shape change. I envision PSAs as playing a role in modeling soft-bodied agents, such as soft robots and biological cells.