Me: Your cell phone is a computer Them: Oh yeah, common metaphor. They used to think everything was like pumps and water, then when clockwork was the big technology they thought everything was clockwork, and now the technology is computers they think everything is a computers

We often assume that specialized roles improve performance in multi-agent systems, but when does specialization emerge based on a given task and environment? 🧵👇 ⭐️ New preprint w/ Ruaridh Mon-Williams, Neil Bramley, Chris Lucas, Natalia Vélez (natvelali.bsky.social @ 🦋), Griffiths Computational Cognitive Science Lab arxiv.org/abs/2503.15703

Our new paper with Max Taylor-Davies introduces a resource-rational model of Theory of Mind. The model can explain many of the successes and failures of mindreading in human adults and children, and non-human primates: 🧵

very excited about this line of work, and had a lot of fun collaborating with Tadeg Quillien!

If I gave you these evolution rules, can you tell me what will stay constant during the evolution? Very belated thread on recent work on hydrodynamics of circuit systems! Work with Friedrich Hübner, Juan P. Garrahan, and Benjamin Doyon. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2503.08788 (1/7)

For anyone at Evostar, this is happening at 14:45 in room A!

behavioral economics is cool because it combines the worst parts of economics and psychology

Our #CogSci2025 paper led by Madeleine Horner (with Adam Moore) explores people's lay conception of empathy. Main finding: people have a robust expectation that agents who feel empathy are more likely to help, especially when helping is costly.

Very grateful to Evostar and my peerless coauthors for this! Glad our work resonated and hope to do more along these lines in the future :)

I wrote a short blog post about our experimental work on the logic of guesses:

You work on RL from pixels, and you're tired to wait 10 hours for a DMC run to finish? Or up to 100 hours, if you add video distractors? Well, we got you covered : PixelBrax can run your continuous control experiments from pixels in < 1 hr! Come chat with Trevor McInroe and I at

Extended Flow-#Lenia paper is out in Artificial Life journal , with more experiments and insights! See 🧵 from 1st-author erwan plantec below for a summary. For a full overview of Inria Flowers team research in Artificial Life, here is a talk I gave at Demeco : youtube.com/watch?v=YYFrWN…

very elegant paper!

happening now!

🇨🇦 Heading to RL_Conference next week to present HyperMARL (CoCoMARL workshop) and Remember Markov (Finding The Frame Workshop) . If you are around, hmu, happy to chat about Multi-Agent Systems (MARL, agentic systems), open-endedness, environments, or anything related! 🎉

My Lab at the University of Edinburgh🇬🇧 has funded PhD positions for this cycle! We study the computational principles of how people learn, reason, and communicate. It's a new lab, and you will be playing a big role in shaping its culture and foundations. Spread the words!

LLMs have convincingly demonstrated that coding is the easiest activity, maths is medium hard, and having taste is the hardest

3 papers from Inria Flowers team are presented this week at the ALIFE Conference 2025 , leveraging curiosity-driven AI to explore complex behaviors in #Lenia All first authors are attending the conference if you want to discuss with them Link to interactive websites, papers and code below: