EMERGENCE.

Published 2022-04-29
Patreon: www.patreon.com/mlst
Discord: discord.gg/ESrGqhf5CB
Pod version: anchor.fm/machinelearningstreettalk/episodes/75---…

An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the low-level interactions, these might be interactions between components of the system or the components and their environment.

In our epic introduction we focus a lot on the concept of self-organisation, complex systems, cellular automata and strong vs weak emergence. In the main show we discuss this in detail with Dr. Daniele Grattarola and cover his recent NeurIPS paper on learning graph cellular automata.

Featuring;
Dr. Daniele Grattarola
Dr. Tim Scarfe
Dr. Keith Duggar
Prof. David Chalmers
Prof. Ken Stanley
Prof. Julian Togelius
Dr. Joscha Bach
David Ha
Dr. Pei Wang

[00:00:00] Special Edition Intro: Emergence and Cellula Automata
[00:49:02] Intro to Daniele and CAs
[00:57:23] Numerical analysis link with CA (PDEs)
[00:59:50] The representational dichotomy of discrete and continous at different scales
[01:05:21] Universal computation in CAs
[01:10:27] Computational irreduciblity
[01:16:33] Is the universe discrete?
[01:20:49] Emergence but with the same computational principle
[01:23:10] How do you formalise the emergent phenomenon
[01:25:44] Growing cellula automata
[01:33:53] Openeded and unbounded computation is required for this kind of behaviour
[01:37:31] Graph cellula automata
[01:43:40] Connection to protein folding
[01:46:24] Are CAs the best tool for the job?
[01:49:37] Where to go to find more information

Thanks to our patrons!

VIP patrons;
Alex McNamara
Ebonia Elliott-Lewis

All access patrons;
John Mitchell
Konstantinos Barmpas

And also;
Federico Rios
Francesco Puddu
Ian Finley
John
Lukas Segelmark
MarkMc
Paul Oreto
Philip Leggier
Timothy O’Hear
Łukasz Stafiniak

References;

(intro)
Strong and Weak Emergence [Chalmers]
consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf

Weak Emergence [Bedau]
people.reed.edu/~mab/papers/weak.emergence.pdf

Complexity - a guided tour [Melanie Mitchell]
www.amazon.co.uk/Complexity-Guided-Tour-Melanie-Mi…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence#Strong_and_weak_em…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

The Case for Strong Emergence [Sabine Hossenfelder]
philpapers.org/rec/HOSTCF-3

The Future of Artificial Intelligence is Self-Organizing and Self-Assembling [Sebastian Risi]
sebastianrisi.com/self_assembling_ai/

Thanks to marknzed from Discord

(main show)

Learning Graph Cellular Automata [Grattarola]
arxiv.org/pdf/2110.14237.pdf

Grattarola article on GCA
danielegrattarola.github.io/posts/2021-11-08/graph…

Dwarf Fortress
procedural-generation.tumblr.com/post/135866825581…

Growing Neural Cellular Automata [Alexander Mordvintsev]
distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/

AlphaFold [Deepmind]
www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/alp…

Mandlebrot set
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set

FDM/PDE
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference_method
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_differential_equatio…

A new kind of science [Wolfram]
www.wolframscience.com/nks/

Wofram physics project
www.wolframphysics.org/

writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may…

Game of life clock
codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/88783/build-a…

AlphaFold
www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2

Michael Levin
as.tufts.edu/biology/people/faculty/michael-levin
ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/
www.growbyginkgo.com/2022/03/21/when-robots-multip…
www.growbyginkgo.com/2020/06/29/is-dna-hardware-or…

Emergent garden
youtube.com/c/emergentgarden/videos
mobile.twitter.com/max_romana

The edge of chaos
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_chaos

Computation at the edge of chaos: Phase transitions and emergent computation [Langton]
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0167…

Lenia
chakazul.github.io/lenia.html

Slackermanz
slackermanz.com/understanding-multiple-neighborhoo…

Daniele doing a talk on his work
   • Learning Graph Cellular Automata | Da...  

Smarter podcast (Daniele’s pod!)
   / @smarterpodcast6806  

All Comments (21)
  • Thanks for having me on, I had a really great time chatting with you guys. The work you do with the channel is absolutely insane, such a high production value!!!
  • Your introductions are so spectacular. Really sets MLST apart. Thank you!
  • @mattbabik8417
    One of my favorite topics as a junior neuroscientist. Finding simplicity in the unexplainable
  • @neuronwave
    Heading off to the Santa Fe Institute in June to study and can't think of a better talk to listen to prior to going. Thank you.
  • @GBlunted
    Wolfram has been on Lex Friedman's podcast 3 times in which they go into depth on CA and Wolfram's theory of everything, all of which are good to listen to to try and understand Wolfram's grasp of languages and various stuff he's into! 👍🏽
  • Love this! I was into Complex Systems before ML started booming and took over. Talks from the Santa Fe Institute are amazing.
  • @ianfinley89
    Man what an incredible episode! I'm going to have to watch it a few more times because it is packed to the brim with information.
  • Loved the attitude of Dr. Grattarola: modesty, curiosity and striving for semplicity over this-is-how-it-works and my-method-is-key.
  • Very interesting! Need to come back to rewatch properly. Emergence can be boiled down to the very basics of even the mathematics set theory: if a set has no elements, will also have no properties at all; if you add 1 element, now the set has more properties; if you add 1 more element, new properties emerge; 3,4,5 elements... properties increase exponentially. 'Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes'...
  • Absolutely fascinating! I'd wondered what happened to CAs since Life in the 1980s. So excited to see the new developments.
    David Bohm's implicate and explicate orders keep popping into mind, I wonder why? Thank you....
  • @dr.mikeybee
    Hearing about Sebastian Risi, I'm immediately reminded of spooky action at a distance. Contrary to the idea of localization where self-assembly is based solely on local interactions. How might a system with an object that has a property read by two separate functions operate? Now you have cellular automata but only when not in opposition to a map like DNA. Moreover, the map is evolved over generations.
  • Great video guys! Initially I found the idea of Chalmers viewing consciousness as strongly emergent to be counterintuitive at first, but when you parse in the role of supervenience it becomes clear his proposed dualism and emergence from the physical are not contradictory. I thought this distinction was well handled here.
  • @michaelwangCH
    Watch out, Dalle2 becomes imaginative and more human like. We are close to reach general intelligent. It is great work to understand human intelligence.
  • Great video! This feels a bit uncanny, especially the work on neural cellular automata, since, through sheer coincidence, I was talking with someone yesterday about how the nodes in Hopfield networks can be thought about like cellular automata.
  • @spiritcrusha
    Is Sabine implying that strong emergence exists? From I gathered, she is saying that strong emergence cannot be ruled out due to our current fundamental theories being more effective than fundamental.