 Hey folks welcome to artificial life creation t plus three and swimming it's about the fish so the goals for this time was number one to submit a paper to the alife 23 conference i did that talk about it a little bit number two to get coordinated movement of multiple different cells in a multicellular creature that's what we just sort of saw uh also to get companion at caring my dad's book that we just published in stores meaning uh on on the web and and we did that we'll show you and of course always have a big fund it was a mixed bag i'm struggling with this multicellularity stuff but you know it was fun when stuff worked and there was there was there was good fun in various spots okay so the schedule we were supposed to have coordinated movement uh this time we sort of semi have coordinated movement you know the fins kind of bounce behind but they're doing better than they were last month and that's all i can really uh hope uh for myself and in addition uh coming up next month uh in may is supposed to be junctions and intercellular signal signaling but really we have to have something like that in order to do coordinated movement so i've already kind of reached ahead to that and i'll talk about that a little bit today all right fish gotta swim uh uh you know there's a person uh samter who's been catching up on the videos for the last several months asking lots of good questions in a way you know sometimes the questions are a little bit challenging uh and i don't actually get enough time to to go back and give good answers to all them but i do sometimes i try to and i have to say that um you know figuring out how to respond to a appointed question you know like that you know polite and everything but it seems like this was kind of you know pointless uh system becoming rather bespoke so getting very specific um and you know so my reply to this is that you know well we have this idea of like major transitions in evolution when you're doing engineering bottom up that you're gonna have to build the pieces and then you're gonna build a thing out of the pieces but you're not done there because then you're gonna step back and make machines that are bigger and slower and use the thing that you made out of the pieces as a piece in the next level and so on and the major transitions in evolution from chemistry to biology to multicellularity to societies and interplanetary who are um are all examples of that that we keep stepping back make machines that are bigger and slower and use what used to be uh the pride of place of a single thing is now just a mere uh component of a larger system um and and and structured all scales ended up being sort of the the punchline of the artificial life paper i submitted so uh this is part of what's going on multicellularity is is making that next step we've been working at atoms and molecules up to a single cell and that was pretty good challenge all by itself but now we're trying to go to the next level and it's hard why is it bigger and slower and and part of it is the design that we're now up at this multicellular level the language itself doesn't really know anything about the language is still about event windows atoms sites and so forth so i'm writing a lot of code i'm not feeling good about the code i'm writing i'm cutting and pasting a lot uh the design that i'm going for is getting out ahead of the tools and you know on the one hand you say that's bad but on the other hand you see this is a a design foray that we're trying to get out into the wilderness and and spring the bear traps to find the deadfalls so that we could help figure out what kind of tools we would want to help us uh the next time around rather than think we can sit in our abstract armchair and just derive what the tools ought to be without actually getting out in the field so one of my worries is you know multicellular menagerie you know when i started this six month run i was thinking oh hey you know i'll just knock out a new multicellular creature every month and so the first thing that i made was you know add two little halves multi half size cells next to a full size cell and column fins you know that was so trivial and i'm still on it the the fish the the fish swimming maybe the only thing in the menagerie you know maybe there's going to be a whole bunch of little fish swimming along we shall see so but along the way to getting there there's been a lot of progress and uh part of it is you know in the in the single cell system the the edge of the cell the membrane at the end of the cell had basically one job which is to say you know is there anything out there is it a wall is it the edge of the universe is another cell anything and i just want to stay away from it because i want to you know keep from getting overrun keep getting into it and so forth but multicellularity it's not that simple because some you know we have to do identification friend or foe to some degree because if it's a another cell out there that's part of us that is part of our coordinated collective then we want to we're more willing to stay close to it than it is if it's some kind of random so there's this concept now called corner distances where the m base atoms those are the innermost membranes uh that are right next to the edge of the hard cell three grid itself they talk to each other and they think they localize themselves with respect to each side so the corner distance of zero is how many pockets there are um i'm very excuse me for a second here i've got uh terrible terrible allergies you probably hear it in my nose um how many pockets clockwise and anti-clockwise this particular m base is and they all figure it out so so this one up here is three pockets clockwise and one pocket counterclockwise this one is zero clockwise and four counterclockwise and so forth so with corner distances you get two pieces of information you can add up the corner distances and figure out how long the side is which tells you how big the cell is just in a sense um or you can look at the specific numbers and tell where you are how far clockwise you are along whatever side you're on and the next level out the cyan uh m sensor atoms they pick up the corner distances now from the m bases and the intercellular goo the brown stuff which reaches out quite far picks up the uh uh information from the m sensors or the m bases whatever they can happen to see and carries it out further and finally the neighboring cells uh in this case there's a new special kind of hard cell grid atom called an edge hg that has additional behavior just because it's on the outer edge of the diamond it now has inbound corner distances so what we saw out over here uh where is it there it is an m base saying i'm one clockwise four counterclockwise that went out through the uh m sensors into the intercellular goo and eventually reached this edge so this guy can now say my neighbor number one is size five and number two they are uh we are approximately at uh one clockwise four counterclockwise on that cell and that's how the uh fish fins are now trying to localize themselves by looking at that corner distant information that's coming in from the neighboring cell uh and vice versa the position of the fin is being transmitted by the same mechanism to the fish bod the fish body and now the fish fins and the fish body each have a special controller atom that rides up right and sits right next to the root and looks at all this information come in and overrides what the root would normally do as far as moving around and trying to get away from everything all that behavior is still there but we're overriding it to say no no no that's a friend let's stay closer to it than you want to and so forth and if something goes wrong if the controller dies then free will the lower level that's that's my new definition of what free will means free will in an api means you have nothing to say and you let the implementation do whatever it wants to do and that's free will at the level of that api so the fins in the body are now mutually servoing each other the fins are trying to stay in the middle of their assigned size the the body is trying not to get too far out ahead and you know it kind of works and you know it worked well enough that i put it on the grid and you know it's just starting so there's just a little bit of this um but it's doing all right the mfms simulator is carrying over to the t2 matrix yeah i've officially renamed uh uh this the thing that we're looking for the hardware i'm calling it the matrix now not to put too fine a point on it uh um so you know uh the controller the fish bod controller see look at that uh it's going down to change its mind it's going up it's cruising along uh um and the fact that it was going a little bit left and right there that was the servoing to for the body trying to stay in between the two fish and and help it out the two fins and help it out and so forth so progress progress it is big science uh i wrote an eight page paper for the artificial life 2023 submitted it with two whole minutes to spare before the absolute drop deadline went and got some sleep came back to this thing saying uh you have 24 hours to meet this requirement for that you have to anonymize your paper i've never done a anonymized paper submission this is the double blind concept you always you never well in almost all cases you don't know who the reviewers are but here the reviewers aren't supposed to know who the author is and so i had to google all that and figure out what the rules were and so forth and i'm still not completely sure what the rules are but this is what that my affiliation now looks like in the paper that i submitted and the the conference the official people in the conference said it was okay and it's off getting reviewed and so on and so forth but during the review period you have to be careful about uh social media like that you're supposed to not try to drive it out there so i'm not talking about what the title of the paper is or any of the guts of it and so forth we'll probably talk about that next month assuming the the reviewing period is will be done by then which i think it will uh uh so that's going out there and again like i said before a lot of the stuff that came out of conversations the we have had you know folks in the crew in the discord questions and youtube all of that stuff has reemerged in the discussion of the paper and you know i am biased but yeah uh you know we've got a movable healable growable programmable inheritable replicator uh it's a little bit awesome so we'll say uh all right uh so that's big science and finally companion at caring this my dad's book that was bringing out uh just because i wanted to get the words out there and also to help figure out how this whole self-publishing thing the goal for this month was to get it into the stores it is now in the stores you can buy it at amazon you can buy it at walmart you can buy it at barnesandnoble.com uh you can buy it at bookshop.org and they even give a little bit of a discount uh most everybody is selling it for list price 24.99 it's expensive it's a short book it's it's not meant to be a number one best seller on the other hand uh you know look at this we've sold seven copies really doing numbers now uh you know thank you to everyone um and you know especially uh for the folks in the live stream i so appreciate people who managed to you know find to find the time to show up at the you know the actual appointed hour um so i'm giving away two copies of dad's book uh to the first two folks who say companion at caring okay in the youtube live stream chat and somehow get me a physical mailing address associated with whatever their handle is uh uh sometime today okay and that's just you know just a little bit this is this is all me trying to pretend to be uh uh marketing you know instead of like whispering in a well which is my preferred form of marketing uh uh so hopefully uh a couple of folks who will be interested in taking a look at that uh well we'll get it and and that'll be fun and that's it uh uh the goals for a month from now is clean living fish i mean the what we saw was one big mess i would also like to have a second species started that might be too ambitious like i said maybe the menagerie is going to be all fish we'll see uh also some first draft some brainstorming about plans for the second half of 2023 because this is only taking us apart way and of course more big fun and that's it thanks so much for stopping in whether in the live stream we're coming back to look at it at any time and i hope to see you next time