The ECSU will host a workshop at the ALIFE 2025 Conference in Kyoto, Japan. The 2025 Conference on Artificial Life, titled Ciphers of Life, will be held from 6-10 October 2025. The program can be found here. The ECSU's workshop TONAL 2025 can be found here.
Please direct any questions to the organizers at the following email address: ecsu.alife@oist.jp
Dr. Tom Froese
Associate Professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), where he heads the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit (ECSU). His research spans theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches to life, mind, and sociality.
Dr. Mark James
Philosopher and cognitive scientist in ECSU, OIST. He specializes in how multi-scale dynamics shape health, identity, and behavior. As co-creator of the Wayshaping framework—a theoretically grounded approach to behavior change rooted in complex systems and embodied cognition—he explores change as a process of collaborative negotiation across biological, psychological, and social levels. He is especially interested in how noise enables alignment across these scales.
Natalya Weber
PhD student in ECSU, OIST. Her work investigates the relationship between learning and emergent creativity in complex adaptive systems through computational modeling.
Georgii Karelin
PhD student in ECSU, OIST, with a background in theoretical astronomy. His interests include simple computational models (e.g., cellular automata, agent-based models) and the intersection between artificial life and astrobiology.
What if noise is not merely tolerated by life, but embraced—perhaps even essential?
This workshop explores the generative and functional roles of randomness and noise in artificial life (ALife). Our central conjecture is that stochasticity is not just a background condition or a nuisance to overcome, but a vital and irreplaceable component of living systems—natural and artificial alike.
From random mutations driving evolution to chaotic dynamics in numerical simulations, unpredictability often sits at the heart of emergent complexity. In ALife, randomness appears in various forms: it may be exogenous (as procedural input), or endogenous (emerging from the system itself during its evolution). In either case, it poses a critical question: If artificial and natural life persistently co-exist with randomness, how might they benefit from it—or even thrive on it?
We invite discussion on whether some noise is actively generated or amplified by living systems and whether such noise plays a meaningful, causally efficacious role in the system’s operational closure. By better understanding these dynamics, we may be able to engage with artificial living systems in richer, more meaningful ways.
This workshop aims to build a community around exploring how ALife can better harness randomness and noise. We welcome contributions on topics including (but not limited to):
Random variation and novelty: Mechanisms by which randomness fuels creativity and open-ended evolution in natural and artificial systems.
Homeostasis through noise: Strategies for maintaining robustness and functional stability amid dynamic, chaotic environments.
Beneficial noise and flexibility: The ways in which variable perturbations enhance adaptive potential and responsiveness.
Intrinsic sources of randomness: Origins of noise within biological and artificial systems, and their operational significance.
“Edge of chaos” revisited: Historical and current perspectives on criticality, complexity, and the role of noise in system transitions.
Cross-scale integration: How noise contributes to alignment and integration across biological, cognitive, and social scales.
Engineering stochasticity: Techniques for designing or inducing beneficial randomness in artificial systems to support open-endedness and autonomy.
