Quine Hackerspace Lausanne

Discover with Philippe the hidden beauties at the Botanique Garden at Geneva. Saturday, 25th of September at 14:00. 🍄🌳🌷🌵

To participate, add your name to the following doodle: https://doodle.com/poll/pc2x5aquwaq8c66z?utm_source=poll&utm_medium=link

If you are not vaccinated, please make a covid test. Stay safe, have fun! 🤩🥳

A good way to start again publishing things here is to mention the beautiful https://alien-project.org/

artificial life environment Artificial Life Environment (ALiEn) is a simulation program based on a specialized 2D physics and rendering engine in CUDA. Each simulated body has a graph-like structure of connected building blocks that can either be programmed or equipped with functions to act in the world (accelerators, sensors,...

Neural Cellular Automata create beautiful structures and fascinating decentralized processes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unF2CVkMIiE&feature=youtu.be

Self-Organising Neural Cellular Automata "The virtual creatures competition" submission. Self-Organising Neural Cellular Automata Alexander Mordvintsev, Ettore Randazzo, Eyvind Niklasson, Peter Whid...

Progressive GANs to generate delicate animal silhouettes https://corte.si/posts/code/genzoo/

corte.si A couple of years ago a paper titled Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation cropped up on my reading list. It describes growing generative adversarial networks progressively, starting with low-resolution images, and then building up more detail as training goes on...

Would you like to build your own cellular automata? In this nice article, Kjetil Golid teaches us how to do it. https://javascript.christmas/2019/22

Cellular Automata in the Browser An article from javascript

When growing older, we get all worried about the middle-aged belly. Well, this is not only a human problem but also a galaxy problem! A recent study, published in Nature Astronomy, discovered that there is a relationship between galaxy shape and their age: older they get, more spheric they become.

http://theconversation.com/from-pancakes-to-soccer-balls-new-study-shows-how-galaxies-change-shape-as-they-age-95379

From pancakes to soccer balls, new study shows how galaxies change shape as they age As galaxies get older they get rounder, and fall victim to the middle-aged spread that catches many of us humans here on Earth.

Looking for an adventure that never ends? Then AI Dungeon 2 is the game for you. Choose the style you want to play (fantasy, mystery, zombie) and have fun. Unpredictable scenarios, weird orcs interactions, and a huge dose of creativity. AI Dungeon 2 is based on the super powerful and super cool GPT-2 model.

P.S. For those who are tech nerds: GPT-2 is a transformer-based deep learning model for text generation created by OpenAI and released one year ago. It has a crazy number of 1.5 billions of parameters, and it has been trained with 40Gb of data 😮 (for comparisons, all Shakespeare's plays occupy ~8Mb).

https://play.aidungeon.io/

AI Dungeon 2 AI Dungeon 2, an infinitely generated text adventure powered by deep learning

Five shapes are needed to create infinite harmonic patters: they are Torange, Pange, Shesh Band, Sormeh Dan, and Tabl. They have the same length and all their angles are multiples of π/5 radians. For centuries, Arab artists have constructed magnificent decorations assembling together these 5 shapes creating Girih tiles. It was suggested that girih tilings are similar to quasicrystalline tilings, a structure that has been discovered by mathematicians in the '60 and observed in nature only in 2009. Math, art, and nature intertwine in a beautiful garland.

For hundreds of years, people have observed and studied snowflakes. Their beauty, the geometrical symmetry and ephemeral nature awe humans for generations. Only recently, we have solved some of the mysteries surrounding their generation and their shapes. However, still, there are open questions: why the six branches of a single snowflake are almost identical?

Create your own snowflake:
http://paulkaplan.me/SnowflakeGenerator/

paulkaplan.me

What can you do if you train a 2D cellular automaton with 16 channels and 3x3 convolutional updates? Find out here: https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/?/

Growing Neural Cellular Automata Differentiable Self-Organisation: A Cellular Automata model of Morphogenesis.

Are you looking for a non-intense research topic? Just sit down and observe lazy salamanders for seven years :).

Researchers Tracked A Wild Salamander That Stayed Completely Still For Seven Years Sometimes you find a tiny patch of rock in an underwater cave that’s so perfect that you just have to sit there for seven years without moving. According t

Quine at ! 4th place at Reinforcement Learning challenge (256 submissions). If only Colab did not crash irreversibly after 20 minutes (in a challenge of 2 hours) our drones could have delivered many more packages. :) 🚀🛸

The "cute" shapes of viri. 😅

Visti così sono decisamente dolci

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Quine Hackerspace Lausanne (@LausanneQuine) | Twitter The latest Tweets from Quine Hackerspace Lausanne (). The Quine association was founded in 2019, with the aim to pursue creative and scientific endeavors. rue Haldimand 14, Lausanne

In 1736, a young Leonard Euler "invented" graph theory. The elegant city of Königsberg is crossed by a river and, at the time, seven bridges were built to connect the different parts of the city. Being a city of merchants, a question was very popular "Is it possible to have a walk in Königsberg by crossing all the bridges only once?". Euler gave the answer: no. Besides the answer, the great contribution of Euler was to move the attention from the whole map of the city to only its bridges and how they are connected. The representation he created generalizes bridges as lines connecting points, the landmasses. By using this description, he could find a solution that can answer the same question for any number of bridges in any city! With this work, Euler laid the foundation of graph theory and networks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg

Seven Bridges of Königsberg - Wikipedia The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a historically notable problem in mathematics. Its negative resolution by Leonhard Euler in 1736[1] laid the foundations of graph theory and prefigured the idea of topology.[2]

Great news: Bert Chakovsky just discovered self-replicating creatures/solitons/entities/cells in Lenia! See there: https://twitter.com/BertChakovsky/status/1219308616643047424

Bert Chan 🐞🔬🤖 on Twitter “SELF-REPLICATION discovered in Lenia. You can witness the moment of mitosis. Using 's idea of multiple neighborhood, it injects dissonance into the structures, opens the door to more interesting phenomena. https://t.co/6bJ0FkxmiX https://t.co/hWp1kzW8al”

Quine Hackerspace Lausanne updated their website address.

Quine went to Hong Kong where we met Bert Chakovsky, the creative mind behind Lenia, the mesmerizing artificial life project. His work has attracted the attention of researchers in EPFL and Stanford. We spoke about the future of artificial life and the new projects Bert is working on. Big surprises will come soon. Stay tuned :).

To know more about Lenia, look at this amazing video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE46jKYcI4Y

Behind soap bubbles, beautiful mathematical rules are hidden! Isolated soap bubbles are almost spherical, with little deformation due to the Earth gravity. Things become much more interesting when two or three bubbles come in touch: they packed in an exact pattern forming 180 and 120 degrees angles respectively. By increasing the number of bubbles, the system becomes more chaotic and more difficult to predict. However, in some particular conditions, highly packed bubbles take the shape of hexagons forming foam structures similar to honeycombs. What a surprise! These beautiful mathematical rules were discovered by Joseph Plateau in the XIX century.

https://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/bubbles/bubble_meets_bubble.html

Zebra stripes are still enigmatic: what is their purpose? Why do they have those particular orientations? In 1952, Alan Turing proposed a simple model to study animal stripes. However, orientation in periodic patterns in animals have remained obscured for a long time. In 2017, Hiscock and Megason published a paper in Cell System in which they proposed a general model able to describe different stripes patterns in animals. Here you can find an article published on Phys.org with an interview with one of the authors, and the original paper.

https://phys.org/news/2015-12-mathematical-animal-stripes.html
https://www.cell.com/cell-systems/fulltext/S2405-4712(15)00215-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS240547121500215X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

In the past decades, nanotechnology had a storm of hype. However, the first "nanotechnologists" date back to the medieval age, when stained glass artisans created magnificent coloured windows by using gold and silver nanoparticles. How? We know that gold and silver have their characteristic colours so appreciated by jewelers and jewelry possessors: this arises from their intrinsic electronic properties. However, if we make the gold (or any other metal) particles smaller and smaller, other phenomena arise. When particles have nanometric sizes, they have special waves running on the surface, polarons, which can absorb and scatter different wavelengths compared to the massive metal. The polarons depend on the size and shape of the nanoparticles, and thus, with a single metal type we can create a large rainbow of colours.

An engaging article about artificial life, with beautiful references: https://thegradient.pub/an-introduction-to-artificial-life-for-people-who-like-ai/

Introduction to Artificial Life for People who Like AI The AI enthusiast's Introduction to Artificial Life: old ties between AI and ALife, and what makes ALife research special.

Everyone knows that intelligence comes with big brains. Or not? Discover the blob, an orgamism with no brain at all but that can learn and solve puzzle. In addition, it has 720 sexes and it is forever young. The Alphaville's dream.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/paris-zoo-unveils-bizarre-brainless-blob-capable-learning-180973363/

Paris Zoo Unveils Bizarre, Brainless ‘Blob’ Capable of Learning—and Eating Oatmeal Physarum polycephalum is known as a slime mold, but it is not in fact a fungus. It’s also not a plant. Or an animal.

Noisy and fascinating self-replicating (quite elaborate) blocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZwTcLeelAY

Self-replicating blocks from Cornell University Researchers at Cornell University demonstrate a robotic system of block-modules that can self-replicate if new blocks are fed into the system. Research team:...

A magnificent cellular automaton on a brain-looking graph: http://nxxcxx.github.io/Neural-Network/

Neural-Network

Before the very much celebrated Sims, many people remember Sim City and some also remember Sim Tower. Less well know is the (not so pretty) Sim Ant, a simulation released in 1991, where you could raise an ant colony with 16 colors. Those were the days.

Sim Ant - Gameplay Yeaaah, this is me playing good old Sim Ant (1991) from Maxis. Im playing a quick game, collect food for the queen, get a bunch of black ants together and fi...

Peer-reviewed by elves?

Information looks ubiquitous in our life. We switch on our smartphone and immediately we get news from all around the world in a few instants. It is so easy that we forget that data have to travel long distances to reach us. Data travels in optic fibers that run all over the Earth surface. This network is gigantic and incredible. But one more incredible thing is the submarine cable network! To cross oceans, data travels in special coated optical fiber, some of them lying at 8000 meters deep! The first submarine cables were laid in the 1850s for telegraphic communications. Nowadays, big companies like Google are investing in new submarine connections.
https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

Submarine Cable Map TeleGeography’s free interactive Submarine Cable Map is based on our authoritative Global Bandwidth research, and depicts active and planned submarine cable systems and their landing stations. Selecting a cable on the map projection or from the submarine cable list provides access to the cable’s...

We are preparing a Xmas surprise for you. Stay tuned!
https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/587065

Jelly Sim - OpenProcessing Similar to Konstantin Makhmutov's 'Wobbly Swarm' project, but with extra functionality and a more readable/expandable source.

Self replication brought to 3D printing: a rabbit-quine! https://www.newscientist.com/article/2226644-3d-printed-bunny-contains-dna-instructions-to-make-a-copy-of-itself/

3D-printed bunny contains DNA instructions to make a copy of itself A 3D-printed bunny contains tiny glass beads in which there are DNA-encoded instructions to replicate the rabbit, and they can still be read after nine months

Who has not played as a child at Hide and Seek? In my childhood it was my favorite game: I loved to find new creative ways to hide from my peers. My favorite was to predict where the seeker would have moved to look for me and move accordingly occupying those spots that he/she has already checked. I don't know if also computers have fun playing Hide and Seek, but for sure they can learn amazing strategies! That it was have been done at openai. By using reinforcement learning, a special deep learning technique, the researchers observed how virtual hiders and seekers improved their ability by using all elements present in their environment and by anticipating the moves of their opponents.
If you want to know more, you can read the paper, first link, and watch the amazing videos published in the second one!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.07528
https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/

Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction We've observed agents discovering progressively more complex tool use while playing a simple game of hide-and-seek.

Randomness is at the base of modern cryptography: a strong encryption key should be generated randomly. However, modern computers are not able to create real random numbers but sequences that are pseudo-random. Nature, on the other hand, is full of randomness. Scientists know it very well: in any experimental measure, they need to take into account the presence of random noise that they need to remove by statistical analysis. Is it possible to exploit the intrinsic randomness of nature in cryptography? Cloudfare has the answer: to generate random numbers they use.... 100 lava lamps! Cameras are pointed at the lava lamps and numbers are generated by association with the unpredictable shapes of the bubbles. Visitors are welcome to enter into the lava lamps room because each little interaction can generate more randomness! A similar idea was already proposed in 1996 by Silicon Graphics.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/

An exciting and hilarious video by the quinemaster Mame https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K7EmeptEHo

RubyConf 2017: Esoteric, Obfuscated, Artistic Programming in Ruby by Yusuke Endoh Esoteric, Obfuscated, Artistic Programming in Ruby by Yusuke Endoh Ruby has a rich and flexible syntax. It allows us to write not only an easy-to-read progra...

Peptides are short chains of amino acids, the building blocks of all proteins. From 1993, researchers have started to study self-assembled peptides, a category of peptides assemble spontaneously into ordered nanostructures. These special peptides can be designed for specific applications and customized with also synthetic amino-acids. In this review of 2017, the authors discuss the use of self-assembled peptides for drug delivery. In fact, self-assembled peptides can be created in a variety of different shapes and chemical functionalities that allow the so-formed nanoparticles to directly and precisely interact with the targeted cells.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jnm/2017/4562474/

Peptide Self-Assembled Nanostructures for Drug Delivery Applications Peptide self-assembled nanostructures are very popular in many biomedical applications. Drug delivery is one of the most promising applications among them. The tremendous advantages for peptide self-assembled nanostructures include good biocompatibility, low cost, tunable bioactivity, high drug load...

If you take a walk on the windy Dutch beaches, you can see strange, gorgeous, exciting mechanical creatures propelled by the wind. Those artificial animals are called "the sand beast", "standbeest" in dutch. Their creator, Theo Jansen, over the years, experimented new shapes making the beast more resistant to wind and water and able to detect if they have entered into the water and move away from it.

https://www.strandbeest.com/

Strandbeest

What is the output of this command in python? s='s=%r;print(s%%s,sep="")';print(s%s,sep="")
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s='s=%r;print(s%%s,sep="")';print(s%s,sep="")
Exactly, the output is identical to its own code. That is a quine.
And at Quine we love quines. Can you write quines in other languages?

Great evening! Thanks to Franck for the amazing presentation, and thank you to amazing guests who animated the evening and the discussions :)! Stay tuned for upcoming events!

A beautiful and moving mini-documentary about artificial life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=wQQ2NHECcvQ&feature=emb_logo

LIFE - EP1: Artificial Life LIFE is a mini documentary series by https://samim.io. Episode 1 focuses on "Artificial Life" (ALife). It features interviews with pioneering researchers in ...

We are ready for the inauguration! Countdown has started. While waiting, here some simulations with cellular automata you can have fun with ;)

http://www.integral-domain.org/lwilliams/Applets/algorithms/cellularautomata.php

Cellular Automata Cellular Automata

A very nice page about a very nice equation: http://mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/index.html

Reaction-Diffusion by the Gray-Scott Model: Pearson's Parameterization at MROB