Welcome to the first episode of the What ALife! Podcast! In this episode, I speak with Hiroki Sayama - Professor in the Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, and the Director of the Binghamton Center of Complex Systems (CoCo), at Binghamton University (USA) - about all things cellular automata (CA): what they are, where they came from, what they are useful for; as well as his own ground-breaking work in CA systems in the late 90s. We also talk about continuous CA, and what the future of CA might look like.

We also discuss his more recent work modelling the spread of covid-19 and how artificial life researchers can help address complex societal problems, based on a short paper of the same name.

Video of Evoloops in action (YouTube): Spontaneous Evolution of Evoloops in Finite Space (youtube.com)

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Artwork credit: Gabriel J. Severino