Special Session

The Distributed Maple Leaves
Cellular Automata, Distributed Dynamical Systems, and Their Applications to Intelligence

at ALIFE 2026

Conference Dates: August 17-21, 2026 - Waterloo, Canada

Submission deadline: March 30th, 2026


Organizers

Stefano Nichele, Østfold University College, Norway
Hiroki Sayama, Binghamton University, USA
Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, University of Waterloo, Canada
Eric Medvet, University of Trieste, Italy
Mario Pavone, University of Catania, Italy

This special session is an initiative of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Artificial Life and Complex Adaptive Systems.

Scope of the special session

Distributed dynamical systems such as Cellular Automata and Random Boolean Networks (and everything in between), have long been used as models to understand computation and self-replication in biology, morphogenesis, gene regulation, life-as-it-could-be, and the universe.

Such complex systems models have been extensively studied mathematically and experimentally in all their different variations, such as synchronous and asynchronous updates, dynamic automata networks that can grow and change their structure including components and interconnection topology, as well as their robustness.

Recent advances of such models, including continuous CA such as Lenia [1] and neural-based CA [2], have been proposed as substrates to study the emergence of a more general and open-ended intelligence [3, 4], thanks to their propensity to encode information and create internal representations that support complex multiscale morphogenesis through self-organization and emergence, by acting as genotypic dynamic generative templates [5].

• What can we learn from Cellular Automata and Distributed Dynamical System models about intelligence?
• How can Cellular Automata and Distributed Dynamical System models be used to study the emergence of intelligence?