CLASSS:

Cross Labs ALife Summer School Syllabus

Artificial Life

Christopher Langton is generally credited with coining the term Artificial Life in 1986, followed the next year by the first Artificial Life Conference in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Broadly speaking, ALife is concerned with studying fundamental principles of "life as it could be" (LAICB), rather than arbitrarily limiting the scope of study to life as it happened to appear on Earth ("life as we know it": LAWKI).

For Students

Welcome to CLASS! CLASS is intended to empower students' first emergence into the complex world of artificial life. Throughout the course students will gain a broadened perspective on living systems and life-like processes from an abstracted, general perspective. We'll discuss big ideas about life (what is it? how did it arise? what would it be like if it happened elsewhere?...), science (how can we make sense of this vast universe?), and complexity (what makes something more interesting than the activity of its parts?).

CLASS 2025 is our prototype for ongoing education efforts. It will be part survey, discussing a wide range of ways researchers brig an artificial life perspective to their work, and part project. Our concrete goal is for students to come up with an idea about one of the ALife systems we've developed for CLASS, and design and run a simple experiment to test it. Our non-objective (and the most important part of CLASS) is to explore ALife. Diversity and curiosity are important concepts in ALife, and have led to the development of algorithms like MAP-Elites and Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies, which have had significant impact on machine learning.
This syllabus and the CLASS slides will be updated and adapted throughout the summer workshop. There may be extra info and resources hidden as Easter eggs.

About Cross Labs

Cross Labs is a research institute in Kyoto, Japan, focused on basic research into the principles of intelligence and abstract characteristics of life-like systems.

Session 1: Entreé (Introduction to ALife)

(In person 2025/08/21. Slides online)

In which our intrepid scholars embark on a whirlwind tour of life, the universe, and complexity.

  1. What is ALife? What is life?
    1. The ALife Perspective
    2. Defining Life
    3. Common Threads of ALife
  2. Notes on Science, Mathematics, and Complexity
    1. The Practice of Science?
    2. Facing strange mathematics
    3. Complexity and ALife
  3. CLASS Systems of Study.
    1. Pareidolia, life Detection, and DaisyWorlds
    2. Reservoir Computing and RL Control
    3. From Textures to Agents with Cellular Automata

Session 2: Explore (Tinkering with ALife)

(In person 2025/08/28)

In which our curious students tinker with strange and complex artificial worlds, and discuss the beginnings of a plan.

Students spend roughly equal amounts of time with each system, and start to think about experimental questions they might want to investigate.
  1. Planetary regulation with daisyworld
  2. Textures and gliders with SRNCA
  3. Reservoir computing with rsvr and gymnasium RL environments

Session 3: Experiment

(In person 2025/09/04)

In which our heroic academics devise a scheme and set it in motion.

We'll split this session into two parts, separated by a break. In the first we'll try to narrow down student ideas into a simple and concrete experiment. In the second part, we'll set up the experiment and try running it.
  1. Concocting an experiment
    1. Develop a hypothesis and design an experiment to test it.
    2. Consider: is the experiment feasible?i What results would help to reject the hypothesis?
  2. Giving it a go
    1. Set up experiments.
    2. Run experiments.
    3. Record results

Session 4: Epilogue

(In person 2025/09/11)

In which our weary heros reflect on their efforts and discuss future plans.

    "I believed, in my early days, that you should spend at least as much time in the polish and presentation as you did in the original research. Now at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation. It's a big, big number."
    - Richard Hamming - 'You and your research'(transcript)
  1. What's next? Telling people about your research
    1. Write about it!
    2. Talk about it!
    3. Publish code?!
  2. Insights from ALife
    1. Scientists from Cross Labs talk about their stories and their work.
  3. Dénouement
    1. Stick around to talk about ALife and give feedback about CLASS 2025. We'll have a few physical demos related to course topics.