Tim Taylor

Two amazing opportunities to work in Helsinki in Christian Guckelsberger's wonderful group, and collaborate with equally amazing researchers in Japan and Australia! bsky.app/profile/creati…

Good grief

📢 Submit your paper to #ALIFE2026 (Waterloo 🇨🇦 & online, 17–21 Aug 2026)! 📝 Full Papers & Summaries deadline: 30 March 2026 📌 Special Sessions, Workshops & Tutorials proposals: 20 Feb 2026 Theme: Living and Lifelike Complex Adaptive Systems 2026.alife.org

On @BBCr4today yesterday @j_amesmarriott used a brilliant junk food metaphor to describe search results produced by AI chatbots, calling them "ultra-processed information, superficially nutritious but actually pretty empty." Listen at bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0… (starts at 2:47:42).

In 1951, in between working on his application to visit John von Neumann's Electronic Computer Project group at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Nils Aall Barricelli also found time to file a patent for "An Improved Chest of Drawers"! 😁 worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDet…

@EdinburghTrams My first experience of this was disappointing. The first three toto machines I tried at Haymarket station today did not work. Had to walk to the other end of platform to find one that worked properly

@cgershen Oh, wow! No! I have not come across that one. I'll definitely check it out! Thank you Carlos :-)

@drtimt Did you read/listen to “The Maniac” by Benjamin Labatut? It’s about von Neumann, but Barrcielli also shows up.

I'm looking forward to reading this novel, written by microbiologist Richard Goodman under the pen name Bonham Richards. Goodman was a friend of ALife pioneer Nils Aall Barricelli, and George Dyson tells me that the character Angelo Kraakmo in the book is based upon Barricelli!

@mnzluca @HirokiSayama @stenichele Fantastic!! I'll be in touch by email. By any chance was your talk today recorded?

@HirokiSayama @drtimt @stenichele I would be very happy to collaborate on this!

Now #IEEEALIFECIS2025 officially kicks off! Stefano Nichele introduces IEEE ALIFE-CIS keynote Luca Manzoni, who discusses the true origin of ALIFE, the work by Nils Barricelli

@HirokiSayama @stenichele (I've already spoken to @stenichele about this 👍)

@drtimt Great! Luca and @stenichele would be great to be involved

The 40th anniversary of the @ALifeConf conference series is approaching. Please contribute your memories and archival materials to help me prepare a book for this anniversary in the field of #ArtificialLife. #ALIFE40 @alifeofficial #alife droplets.vscht.cz/links/alife40

#ALIFE2025 will take place in Kyoto, Japan (6-10 October).

The npj Complexity journal has an open call for a new collection topic "Unnatural Histories: Investigating the Improbable with Experimental Evolution and Artificial Life". Accepting submissions from now up to 12 Sept 2025 nature.com/collections/ha…

I'm happy to announce that the free online version of "Rise of the Self-Replicators" has now been updated to the 2nd edition of the author-formatted version of the book, which includes the 2024 afterword as an additional chapter. Find the online version at tim-taylor.com/selfrepbook/we…

@johnny_83 It was published in Methodos, an Italian journal (no longer in business). A small number of libraries still have it.

@drtimt Do you have a private copy or is that paper available somewhere?

I've finally got a copy of Nils Barricelli's first paper on Artificial Life, in Italian (1954). Would be great to get it translated into English. My preference would be to have this done by a skilled human translator rather than AI. Any bilingual Italian-English folk interested?

To be clear, I don't have any money to pay for a translation, but I anticipate we would get this published in a journal with an introduction authored by me (and the translator if they wished) and with the translator listed as a co-author.

My plan would be to have the English translation published in a journal