emergent behavior

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk tries to defuse the heated debate over undefined behavior in C and C++. He explains from the compiler writer's perspective why UB exists and how it enables optimization.

A one-minute visualization of a simulated ant colony in which ants follow pheromone trails, with the source code on GitHub. It shows emergent behavior arising from simple rules.

The opening lecture of Robert Sapolsky's Stanford course on Human Behavioral Biology, explaining the course premise and how to avoid categorical thinking. It starts a roughly 25-lecture series on how biology, genes, hormones and environment shape behavior.

A Bell Labs film in which Dr. J.N. Shive uses a mechanical wave machine to demonstrate reflection, standing waves, resonance and impedance matching. He includes some equations but relies mostly on real-world examples a layperson can follow.

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky lectures on the evolution of behavior, including the Prisoner's Dilemma and tit-for-tat strategies in animals. It is part of his Human Behavioral Biology course.

A 73-minute Stanford talk by Robert Sapolsky drawn from his book Behave. It surveys the biological factors behind human behavior at its best and worst.

Joe Rogan interviews Stanford neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky about his book Behave. They discuss the biology of human behavior, including toxoplasmosis and risk-taking, and baboon troop dynamics.

OpenAI's short demo of agents playing hide-and-seek in a simulated environment. Through self-play, the agents develop six progressively more complex strategies and counter-strategies, including tool use.

Leaked internal Google X video, 'The Selfish Ledger', a speculative thought experiment about treating user data as a ledger that could guide and shape human behavior, including products sold to fill data gaps.

Sebastian Lague explores an ant-inspired algorithm and simulates ant and slime mold behavior, using compute shaders. Source code for both simulations is available.

Brian Douglas introduces Braitenberg vehicles, simple robots whose sensors are wired directly to motors yet show surprisingly lifelike behavior. He draws on Valentino Braitenberg's book Vehicles.

Two Minute Papers covers OpenAI's multi-agent hide-and-seek experiment, in which agents learned emergent tool use and found ways to break the game's rules. It summarizes the 'Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction' paper.

BBC Earth shows killer whales working as a pod to create waves that wash seals off ice floes, with the producer explaining how the crew captured behavior once thought a myth.

Frans de Waal's TED talk shows videos of behavioral experiments on primates and other mammals that reveal empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity. He argues these moral traits are not uniquely human.

Rhonda Patrick of FoundMyFitness makes a case for isothiocyanates such as sulforaphane from cruciferous vegetables and broccoli sprouts. It covers cancer, aging, heart disease, brain and behavior, and neurodegeneration, with chapter timestamps.

An RSA Animate adaptation of a Dan Ariely lecture on dishonesty. It explores when ordinary people lie or cheat and how they rationalize small acts of dishonesty.

A one-minute New Scientist clip showing a Japanese experiment in which drivers on a circular track produce a spontaneous traffic jam that travels backward. It illustrates phantom traffic jams without any obstacle.

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2013 keynote on how C++ builds complex software from simple emergent structures, and how compilers optimize them through inlining and value semantics.

Toyota Research Institute presents an approach for teaching robots new dexterous behaviors from human demonstration. It explains why this capability matters and what advances made it possible.

CGP Grey explains how traffic jams come from human driving behavior such as tailgating and reaction delays, and how leaving gaps and smoothing speed would reduce congestion. It also touches on self-driving cars.

An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.

RimWorld creator Tynan Sylvester explains at GDC 2017 how Ludeon framed the game as a story generator rather than a game. He covers the design methods that came out of that frame.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on the biological underpinnings of religiosity, from his human behavioral biology course. It covers theories linking religion to stress, and schizotypal traits.

In a TED talk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely uses visual illusions and his research to show that people are less rational in their decisions than they think. He covers defaults, such as organ donation rates, and how choice framing steers decisions.

UC Berkeley EECS colloquium by OpenAI's John Schulman on reinforcement learning from human feedback. He covers why RL helps with truthfulness, hallucination, and the limits of behavior cloning.

Veritasium explains the Dzhanibekov effect, also called the tennis racket theorem, where a spinning object flips unexpectedly about its intermediate axis. The video gives an intuitive account of the underlying rotational dynamics, drawing on Terry Tao's explanation and the original papers.

Amateur footage from the 2009 Sasquatch music festival in which one person starts dancing alone and a crowd gradually joins in, turning it into a dance party.

Rational Reminder podcast episode with Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money. They discuss how investing success depends more on behavior than knowledge, the role of luck and the dangers of emulating top investors.

A three-minute demo of a series circuit with three LEDs that behaves in a surprising way, posed as a question of how it works.

Footage of a huge flock of starlings performing a murmuration, filmed by wildlife cameraman Dylan Winter. The flock moves in tightly coordinated shapes.

A short Discovery nature clip from North America showing a red fox listening for field mice under the snow and then diving headfirst to catch them. The narration says the fox uses its hearing and the Earth's magnetic field to aim its jump.

Short BBC Earth clip from Life of Mammals in which David Attenborough shows orangutans imitating human behaviors like washing clothes with soap and using tools.

A six-minute explainer from Undefined Behavior on range (score) voting. It follows an earlier video on Arrow's Theorem and shows how range voting seems to satisfy the criteria Arrow's Theorem says no ranked system can.

SsethTzeentach reviews Space Station 13, the chaotic multiplayer game, by recounting absurd stories of singularities, malfunctioning AIs and plasma fires.

A one-minute clip of a crow repeatedly sliding down a snowy roof on a small lid, apparently just for fun.

Daniel Kahneman's Talks at Google lecture on his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, covering System 1 and System 2 thinking and the psychology of judgment and decision making.

A three-minute video from Derek Sivers, based on his book Anything You Want, about remembering that the people you deal with online are real people. It contrasts how we treat people face to face with how we treat them online.

BJ Fogg of Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab argues that lasting change comes from tiny habits, such as flossing one tooth or doing one pushup, anchored to things you already do.

Kyle Hill of Because Science explains and demonstrates, using real cards, how Magic: The Gathering can be used to build a Turing machine, a computer inside the card game.

A BBC Earth clip from The Hunt showing Portia jumping spiders, which leap many times their body length and ambush prey larger than themselves.