AKARSH KUMAR, CHRIS LU, LOUIS KIRSCH, YUJIN TANG, KENNETH STANLEY, PHILLIP ISOLA, DAVID HA

With the recent Nobel Prize awarded for radical advances in protein discovery, foundation models (FMs) for exploring large combinatorial spaces promise to revolutionize many scientific fields. Artificial Life (ALife) has not yet integrated FMs, thus presenting a major opportunity for the field to alleviate the historical burden of relying chiefly on manual design and trial-and-error to discover the configurations of lifelike simulations. This paper presents, for the first time, a successful realization of this opportunity using vision-language FMs. The proposed approach, called Automated Search for Artificial Life (ASAL), (1) finds simulations that produce target phenomena, (2) discovers simulations that generate temporally open-ended novelty, and (3) illuminates an entire space of interestingly diverse simulations. Because of the generality of FMs, ASAL works effectively across a diverse range of ALife substrates including Boids, Particle Life, Game of Life, Lenia, and Neural Cellular Automata. A major result highlighting the potential of this technique is the discovery of previously unseen Lenia and Boids lifeforms, as well as cellular automata that are open-ended like Conway’s Game of Life. Additionally, the use of FMs allows for the quantification of previously qualitative phenomena in a human-aligned way. This new paradigm promises to accelerate ALife research beyond what is possible through human ingenuity alone.

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Dino Pedreschi, Luca Pappalardo, Emanuele Ferragina, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Albert-László Barabási, Frank Dignum, Virginia Dignum, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Fosca Giannotti, János Kertész, Alistair Knott, Yannis Ioannidis, Paul Lukowicz, Andrea Passarella, Alex Sandy Pentland, John Shawe-Taylor, Alessandro Vespignani

Artificial Intelligence Volume 339, February 2025, 104244

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Aleksandar Haber, Ferenc Molnar,  Adilson E. Motter

Chaos 34, 123166 (2024)

In the classical control of network systems, the control actions on a node are determined as a function of the states of all nodes in the network. Motivated by applications where the global state cannot be reconstructed in real time due to limitations in the collection, communication, and processing of data, here we introduce a control approach in which the control actions can be computed as a function of the states of the nodes within a limited state information neighborhood. The trade-off between the control performance and the size of this neighborhood is primarily determined by the condition number of the controllability Gramian. Our theoretical results are supported by simulations on regular and random networks and are further illustrated by an application to the control of power-grid synchronization. We demonstrate that for well-conditioned Gramians, there is no significant loss of control performance as the size of the state information neighborhood is reduced, allowing efficient control of large networks using only local information.

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Takahiro Yabe, Bernardo García Bulle Bueno, Morgan R. Frank, Alex Pentland & Esteban Moro 
Nature Human Behaviour (2024)

Disruptions, such as closures of businesses during pandemics, not only affect businesses and amenities directly but also influence how people move, spreading the impact to other businesses and increasing the overall economic shock. However, it is unclear how much businesses depend on each other during disruptions. Leveraging human mobility data and same-day visits in five US cities, we quantify dependencies between points of interest encompassing businesses, stores and amenities. We find that dependency networks computed from human mobility exhibit significantly higher rates of long-distance connections and biases towards specific pairs of point-of-interest categories. We show that using behaviour-based dependency relationships improves the predictability of business resilience during shocks by around 40% compared with distance-based models, and that neglecting behaviour-based dependencies can lead to underestimation of the spatial cascades of disruptions. Our findings underscore the importance of measuring complex relationships in patterns of human mobility to foster urban economic resilience to shocks.

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