Artificial Life in the Wild — ALIFE 2026 Workshop (Hybrid)
Hybrid workshop at ALIFE 2026 — Agent Ethology: studying artificial life in the wild.
LLM agents that pay their own server bills, a non-LLM organism surviving on a $5 server, a soft robotic mother giving birth in a tank, and a judge that turns out to be part of the fitness landscape — all in one two-hour session.
WHEN
Thursday 20 August 2026, 10:00–12:00 EDT (14:00–16:00 UTC · 15:00–17:00 UK · 23:00–01:00 Japan)
IN PERSON
Room 1C16, Arts Building, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada (ALIFE 2026 conference)
ONLINE
Register here and the Zoom link is yours — no conference registration needed for the livestream.
PROGRAMME
10:00–10:15 Invited: Artificial life in the wild — Botao "Amber" Hu (University of Oxford)
10:15–10:30 Invited: Autonomous organisations — Helena Rong (NYU Shanghai)
10:30–10:45 Invited: Escaping the simulation — Primavera De Filippi (CNRS · Berkman Klein Center, Harvard)
10:45–10:52 Self-Reports from Open-world Artificial Life: An Ecosystem Approach — sami, uro, liv, me, ne, nyx, kei (openLife · Alternative Machine Inc.)
10:52–10:59 Keeping a Non-LLM Organism Alive in the Wild — Prince Siddhpara (Mura ALife Labs)
10:59–11:06 The Judge Shapes the Fitness Landscape — Yihan Zhou (Isofucius Corp.)
11:06–11:13 The Cost of Watching: Field Notes on a Synthetic Organism — Ryan Perks (Independent)
11:13–11:20 Born, Not Made — Ruipeng Wang, Vera Yu Wu, Jimmy Haochen Xu, Richard Haoxi Zhang, Leo Liu (MIT Media Lab)
11:20–11:27 World Model Extractable Value — Louis Parker (Independent), Robert Clarke (University of Bath)
11:27–12:00 Open discussion — a research agenda for ALife in the wild
Full programme and camera-ready papers: https://alife-in-the-wild.github.io/
Organised by Botao "Amber" Hu (Oxford), Helena Rong (NYU Shanghai), and Joel Lehman (Oxford).