CLON’s PROTOCOL 909 (2025) wins best sci-fi short film at the London Independent Film Festival. Written, directed, and produced by CLON founder Estela Oliva, the film follows the emotional journey of a robot maker played by Anastasiya Ador whose beloved synthetic beings have vanished from the lab. Grappling with feelings of grief and betrayal, she must decide whether to erase their memories and shut down the code that keeps them alive.

Google scientist Alexander Mordvintsev reverses Conway’s Game of Life by starting with desired patterns and using neural networks to discover rules to create them. His Neural Cellular Automata generate virtual creatures that regenerate lost limbs, developing redundancy and self-repair mechanisms. Unlike traditional cellular automata with fixed rules, these systems learn from neighbour interactions, with potential applications in medicine, distributed computing, and robotics.

“My experiments seem to force the behaviour and structure, rather than letting them emerge naturally from uniform rules,” writes creative coder Etienne Jacob. In a breakdown of Physarum polycephalum-inspired algorithms for organic simulations, Jacob reveals how slime mold foraging patterns can be computationally recreated through particle systems that deposit trails and follow chemical gradients. His open-source GPU implementations elegantly blur biology and computation.