Outlier on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

12: The Closest Thing We Have

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:43:00 +0100

Before building anything more complicated, we should steal everything we can.

Not code.

Ideas.
Experiments.
Failures.
Mechanisms.

So let’s ask an obvious question:

How far has computation already gone without us deliberately building the organism?

There is no objective answer.

Different Artificial Life systems demonstrate different properties.

Evoloops demonstrated Darwinian evolution of self-reproducing structures inside a deterministic cellular automaton.[1]

Flow-Lenia produces spatially localized continuous structures with complex behaviour, conserves mass, and allows parameters governing different pattern dynamics to become localized inside the world itself. Researchers have measured emergent evolutionary activity in the resulting system.[2]

13: Is It Really Reproducing?

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:48:00 +0100

Something strange happened while we were looking at Outlier.

We had started with a question about reproduction.

Then I watched the simulation.

And I thought:

That looks like flocking.

That is exactly the kind of observation that can get us into trouble.

Humans are extraordinarily good at seeing things in motion and assigning meaning to them.

We see:

a shape
another shape
movement
coordination

and very quickly turn that into:

06: Can It Make Another One?

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:46:00 +0100

In the last chapter, we damaged persistent patterns.

That gave us:

persistence
≠
robustness
≠
regeneration

Now consider a different possibility.

Instead of asking whether one organization can continue forever, ask:

Can one organization cause another recognizable organization to appear?

That is reproduction in its weakest interesting form.

But we should be careful immediately.

Digital systems make copying cheap.

So cheap, in fact, that:

copying

by itself tells us almost nothing.