Artificial Life Institute（一般社団法人 人工生命国際研究機構）

Artificial Life Institute (ALI) is the world’s only nonprofit research organization dedicated to ALife, based in Kyoto.
人工生命分野に特化した世界唯一の非営利研究機関です。

[Artificial Life Institute（一般社団法人 人工生命国際研究機構） @ALife_Institute]

What's been holding artificial life back from the open-ended complexity we see in nature?

We posit that the issue, in part, lies in our computational substrates, which are either physically grounded but too slow to evolve at scale, or scalable but disconnected from real physics.

Introducing Microcosmos: a scalable, physically grounded, end-to-end differentiable ALife engine where lifeforms are elastic filament chains swimming in a viscous fluid. Accepted at ALIFE 2026.

https://t.co/N4yuMC18Zx

Why filaments? Chains of connected units, from bacterial flagella to nematode bodies, are among the most ancient and ubiquitous structures in biology. We model each as an elastic rod coupled to the fluid, sensing the local flow as drag and pushing back on it in turn. Because the fluid is physically simulated, this coupling respects real physical constraints such as Purcell's scallop theorem.

Just as a chain of amino acids folds into a protein, a filament can fold into a target shape. Because the full simulation is end-to-end differentiable, we can learn these folds directly with gradient descent.

Microcosmos expresses a rich space of locomotion, from hand-designed swimmers like tadpoles and jellyfish to gaits discovered via quality-diversity search, including sinusoidal undulation, directional turning, and paddling with flippers.

And it scales. Runtime grows linearly with particle count, not quadratically like simulators built on pairwise interactions. That makes evolution at scale feasible.

We release Microcosmos as an open platform for the ALife community to build on. Our hope is to offer a substrate that is grounded enough to be credible, scalable enough to support evolutionary search, and rich enough to inspire.

Paper: https://t.co/OUWToJH4V1
Code: https://t.co/Ot99jGEc0x

[Kenneth Stanley @kenneth0stanley]

I’m proud to have been involved in this work from @ALife_Institute , which originated before I joined @LilaSciences . I’ve long believed that artificial life has the potential to benefit from scale just like AI has. After all, if you think the human brain or an LLM has impressive scale, wait until you look at the scale of evolution on Earth!

A big reason natural evolution produced such magic, in effect all of living nature, is that it has unlimited potential to benefit from scale. Kind of like what we see in AI today. So the fact that Alife has been relegated to minuscule simulators with relatively infinitesimal compute (compared to AI) probably means we haven’t seen any of what artificial evolution could do with a genuinely powerful substrate at scale.

Microcosmos is highly realistic physical Alife simulator with serious thought given to scalability. And the initial experiments (harnessing quality diversity and CPPNs) look really cool, hinting at what could be possible if Alife meets its deep learning moment!

[Mark Tension @Mark_Tension]

New paper!

We built a scalable fluid engine for artificial life🧪🧬🦠 Paper: https://t.co/Tyl6CtLg6b

With interactive webgpu demo in the blogpost

[Artificial Life Institute（一般社団法人 人工生命国際研究機構） @ALife_Institute]

SA does not require consensus. Diverse worldviews coexist — and that is a feature, not a bug. The goal is co-exploration, not forced uniformity.

This has a precedent: Polis (https://t.co/Iplmthwd35) and vTaiwan (https://t.co/c0oe3jm1Z1) already surface common ground across polarized communities without central control.

Not architects. Gardeners.

Paper: https://t.co/7iErkMyTNG

[Artificial Life Institute（一般社団法人 人工生命国際研究機構） @ALife_Institute]

What if AI alignment isn’t about control at all — but about gardening?

We propose Symbiotic Alignment: a framework where coherence between humans and AI emerges from the bottom up, through the co-creation of shared meaning. No single agent holds “ground truth.”

Paper: https://t.co/7iErkMyTNG

[Artificial Life Institute（一般社団法人 人工生命国際研究機構） @ALife_Institute]

We ground SA in Collective Predictive Coding (CPC): a single mathematical addition to multi-agent RL gives every agent — human or AI — an intrinsic drive to negotiate shared symbols with each other, not just maximize individual reward.

This is how language and culture have always emerged: from the bottom up, through interaction. CPC extends this to include AI.

[Artificial Life Institute（一般社団法人 人工生命国際研究機構） @ALife_Institute]

Official account of the "Artificial Life Institute", a Kyoto-based nonprofit dedicated to ALife research.
京都を拠点とする非営利研究団体「一般社団法人人工生命国際研究機構」の公式アカウントです。

Research, papers, events and more.
研究・論文・イベント等の情報を発信予定です。