Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. In these chaotic assemblies, order somehow emerges. Collective behaviors differ in their details from one species to another, but they largely adhere to principles of collective motion that physicists have worked out over centuries. Now, using technologies that only recently became available, researchers have been able to study these patterns of collective animal behavior more closely than ever before. These new insights are unlocking some of the secret fitness advantages of living as part of a group rather than as an individual. The improved understanding of swarming pests such as locusts could also help to protect global food security.

In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz interviews the evolutionary ecologist Iain Couzin about  how and why animals exhibit collective behaviors, and the secret advantages that arise from them.

Listen at: play.prx.org

In this episode, we examine how the course of human history has shaped our scientific knowledge, why the physics community prioritizes some questions over others, and why progress in complex systems research is especially difficult. Academia continues to operate within set boundaries and students are taught certain concepts as fundamental and to skirt others completely. However, the history of science demonstrates that such concepts aren’t always set in stone. It’s possible that blowing open the “shackles of reality,” such as redefining the concept of life itself, and reprioritizing the problems that scientists want to tackle, might help scientists make more progress in this very difficult world of complexity research.

Listen at: complexity.simplecast.com

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Join philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark as he challenges our conventional understanding of the mind’s interaction with the world.

Watch at: www.youtube.com

Welcome to the first episode of the What ALife! Podcast! In this episode, I speak with Hiroki Sayama – Professor in the Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, and the Director of the Binghamton Center of Complex Systems (CoCo), at Binghamton University (USA) – about all things cellular automata (CA): what they are, where they came from, what they are useful for; as well as his own ground-breaking work in CA systems in the late 90s. We also talk about continuous CA, and what the future of CA might look like.
We also discuss his more recent work modelling the spread of covid-19 and how artificial life researchers can help address complex societal problems, based on a ⁠short paper of the same name (direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedings/…2021/33/21/102961)

Listen at: soundcloud.com