The Origin of Information Handling

A major challenge when describing the origin of life is to explain how instructional information control systems emerge naturally and spontaneously from mere molecular dynamics. So far, no one has clarified how information control emerged ab initio and how primitive control mechanisms in life might have evolved, becoming increasingly refined. Based on recent experimental results showing that chemical computation does not require the presence of life-related chemistry, we elucidate the origin and early evolution of information handling by chemical automata, from information processing (computation) to information storage (memory) and information transmission (communication). In contrast to other theories that assume the existence of initial complex structures, our narrative starts from trivial self-replicators whose interaction leads to the arising of more powerful molecular machines. By describing precisely the primordial transitions in chemistry-based computation, our metaphor is capable of explaining the above-mentioned gaps and can be translated to other models of computation, which allow us to explore biological phenomena at multiple spatial and temporal scales. At the end of our manuscript, we propose some ways to extend our ideas, including experimental validation of our theory (both in vitro and in silico).

Self-Reproduction and Evolution in Cellular Automata: 25 Years after Evoloops

The year of 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of evoloops, an evolutionary variant of Chris Langton's self-reproducing loops which proved that Darwinian evolution of self-reproducing organisms by variation and natural selection is possible within deterministic cellular automata. Over the last few decades, this line of Artificial Life research has since undergone several important developments. Although it experienced a relative dormancy of activities for a while, the recent rise of interest in open-ended evolution and the success of continuous cellular automata models have brought researchers' attention back to how to make spatio-temporal patterns self-reproduce and evolve within spatially distributed computational media. This article provides a review of the relevant literature on this topic over the past 25 years and highlights the major accomplishments made so far, the challenges being faced, and promising future research directions.

Extracting Network Structures from Corporate Organization Charts Using Heuristic Image Processing

Organizational structure of corporations has potential to provide implications for dynamics and performance of corporate operations. However, this subject has remained unexplored because of the lack of readily available organization network datasets. To overcome the this gap, we developed a new heuristic image-processing method to extract and reconstruct organization network data from published organization charts. Our method analyzes a PDF file of a corporate organization chart and detects text labels, boxes, connecting lines, and other objects through multiple steps of heuristically implemented image processing. The detected components are reorganized together into a Python's NetworkX Graph object for visualization, validation and further network analysis. We applied the developed method to the organization charts of all the listed firms in Japan shown in the ``Organization Chart/System Diagram Handbook'' published by Diamond, Inc., from 2008 to 2011. Out of the 10,008 organization chart PDF files, our method was able to reconstruct 4,606 organization networks (data acquisition success rate: 46%). For each reconstructed organization network, we measured several network diagnostics, which will be used for further statistical analysis to investigate their potential correlations with corporate behavior and performance.

Speaker Diarization Using Stereo Audio Channels: Preliminary Study on Utterance Clustering

Speaker diarization is one of the actively researched topics in audio signal processing and machine learning. Utterance clustering is a critical part of a speaker diarization task. In this study, we aim to improve the performance of utterance clustering by processing multichannel (stereo) audio signals. We generated processed audio signals by combining left- and right-channel audio signals in a few different ways and then extracted embedded features (also called d-vectors) from those processed audio signals. We applied the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) for supervised utterance clustering. In the training phase, we used a parameter sharing GMM to train the model for each speaker. In the testing phase, we selected the speaker with the maximum likelihood as the detected speaker. Results of experiments with real audio recordings of multi-person discussion sessions showed that our proposed method that used multichannel audio signals achieved significantly better performance than a conventional method with mono audio signals.

Capturing the Production of the Innovative Ideas: An Online Social Network Experiment and "Idea Geography" Visualization

Collective design and innovation are crucial in organizations. To investigate how the collective design and innovation processes would be affected by the diversity of knowledge and background of collective individual members, we conducted three collaborative design task experiments which involved nearly 300 participants who worked together anonymously in a social network structure using a custom-made computer-mediated collaboration platform. We compared the idea generation activity among three different background distribution conditions (clustered, random, and dispersed) with the help of the "doc2vec" text representation machine learning algorithm. We also developed a new method called "Idea Geography" to visualize the idea utility terrain on a 2D problem domain. The results showed that groups with random background allocation tended to produce the best design idea with highest utility values. It was also suggested that the diversity of participants' backgrounds distribution on the network might interact with each other to affect the diversity of ideas generated. The proposed idea geography successfully visualized that the collective design processes did find the high utility area through exploration and exploitation in collaborative work.

The Power of Communities: A Text Classification Model with Automated Labeling Process Using Network Community Detection

The text classification is one of the most critical areas in machine learning and artificial intelligence research. It has been actively adopted in many business applications such as conversational intelligence systems, news articles categorizations, sentiment analysis, emotion detection systems, and many other recommendation systems in our daily life. One of the problems in supervised text classification models is that the models performance depend heavily on the quality of data labeling that are typically done by humans. In this study, we propose a new network community detection-based approach to automatically label and classify text data into multiclass value spaces. Specifically, we build a network with sentences as the network nodes and pairwise cosine similarities between TFIDF vector representations of the sentences as the network link weights. We use the Louvain method to detect the communities in the sentence network. We train and test Support vector machine and Random forest models on both the human labeled data and network community detection labeled data. Results showed that models with the data labeled by network community detection outperformed the models with the human-labeled data by 2.68-3.75% of classification accuracy. Our method may help development of a more accurate conversational intelligence system and other text classification systems.

Self-Organization and Artificial Life

Self-organization can be broadly defined as the ability of a system to display ordered spatio-temporal patterns solely as the result of the interactions among the system components. Processes of this kind characterize both living and artificial systems, making self-organization a concept that is at the basis of several disciplines, from physics to biology to engineering. Placed at the frontiers between disciplines, Artificial Life (ALife) has heavily borrowed concepts and tools from the study of self-organization, providing mechanistic interpretations of life-like phenomena as well as useful constructivist approaches to artificial system design. Despite its broad usage within ALife, the concept of self-organization has been often excessively stretched or misinterpreted, calling for a clarification that could help with tracing the borders between what can and cannot be considered self-organization. In this review, we discuss the fundamental aspects of self-organization and list the main usages within three primary ALife domains, namely "soft" (mathematical/computational modeling), "hard" (physical robots), and "wet" (chemical/biological systems) ALife. Finally, we discuss the usefulness of self-organization within ALife studies, point to perspectives for future research, and list open questions.

Cardinality Leap for Open-Ended Evolution: Theoretical Consideration and Demonstration by "Hash Chemistry"

Open-ended evolution requires unbounded possibilities that evolving entities can explore. The cardinality of those possibilities thus has a significant implication for the open-endedness of evolution. We propose that facilitating formation of higher-order entities is a generalizable, effective way to cause a "cardinality leap" in the set of possibilities that promotes open-endedness. We demonstrate this idea with a simple, proof-of-concept toy model called "Hash Chemistry" that uses a hash function as a fitness evaluator of evolving entities of any size/order. Simulation results showed that the number of individual entities involved in a single replication event gradually increased over time, indicating evolutionary appearance of higher-order entities. It was also observed that the cumulative number of unique replicating entities that appeared in evolution increased almost linearly along time without a bound, presenting a concrete example of open-endedness achieved by the cardinality leap.

Seeking Open-Ended Evolution in Swarm Chemistry II: Analyzing Long-Term Dynamics via Automated Object Harvesting

We studied the long-term dynamics of evolutionary Swarm Chemistry by extending the simulation length ten-fold compared to earlier work and by developing and using a new automated object harvesting method. Both macroscopic dynamics and microscopic object features were characterized and tracked using several measures. Results showed that the evolutionary dynamics tended to settle down into a stable state after the initial transient period, and that the extent of environmental perturbations also affected the evolutionary trends substantially. In the meantime, the automated harvesting method successfully produced a huge collection of spontaneously evolved objects, revealing the system's autonomous creativity at an unprecedented scale.

Self-Organization and Artificial Life: A Review

Self-organization has been an important concept within a number of disciplines, which Artificial Life (ALife) also has heavily utilized since its inception. The term and its implications, however, are often confusing or misinterpreted. In this work, we provide a mini-review of self-organization and its relationship with ALife, aiming at initiating discussions on this important topic with the interested audience. We first articulate some fundamental aspects of self-organization, outline its usage, and review its applications to ALife within its soft, hard, and wet domains. We also provide perspectives for further research.