iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Julian Togelius

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

In our Nature paper, we introduce the first superhuman Stratego AI, which we built using general techniques that we developed for RL & test-time compute under imperfect information. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Scalable decision-making for games of imperfect information - Nature

Ataraxos, an AI for the board wargame Stratego, establishes a design pattern for reinforcement learning and search that is effective under large amounts of hidden information, a longstanding desiderat...

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There's a new (free) book out by Media Evolution, and @ahmed-walid.bsky.social and I have a chapter in it. We're quite happy with it! www.mediaevolution.se/archive/A-Sh...

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Stephanie Chan @scychan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

2/ We should be cautious about future scenarios involving systemic financial dependence. It's harder for financially dependent spouses to exit unsatisfactory marriages. And in countries where oil wealth funded subsidies and state employment, citizens have been vulnerable to state repression.

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Agentic AI could massively speed up productivity by doing all the mandatory compliance and harassment trainings for us

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Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 16/09/2026

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Most effective AI regulation legislation would have terrible side effects, leading to loss of privacy, concentration of power, and restrictions on free research. But there is an alternative: regulate only closed-source (or closed-weight) AI. Keep open-source and open-weight AI unregulated.

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Meanwhile, the nearterm ai doom is real crew includes Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders, Josh Hawley, Sam Altman, and Amodei. And of course in my econ circles there's the "Let the glorious doom sweep away all economic enefficiencies" perspective.

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Weirdest thing about ai today is that the group that believes that nearterm ai doom is bullshit includes: accelerationists, bluesky skeptics, Trump, the government of China.

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

A few years ago, Georgios Yannakakis and I wrote an article about what to do as an AI researcher when a giant AI company steamrolls your research field. I just looked at it again and, well, it’s still relevant. ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/104...

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Brilliant. @aelkus.bsky.social can I steal this for lecture slides?

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

New paper! We are honestly surprised that nobody seems to have explored this idea before. Results are interesting!

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Big news! I'm leaving New York! ...but what on earth? Why? Where am I going?

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Zach Gage @stfj.net · 07/09/2026

Ok im gonna say something here that is going to draw a lot of different feelings from everyone, and I want to be clear i'm not "in support of this" or "against it". i'm just saying it as an observation that seems true to me: I think with the latest frontier LLMs, the “music” era of games is upon us

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I finished Babel by R. F. Kuang, and, well... more preachy than the Pope. And less charitable. It shouldn't be hard to write a novel that makes you dislike colonialism. By the end, I was rooting for the Empire, because of the condescending tone and hopeless character arc of the protagonist.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 05/09/2026

This is interesting. You get assigned to being born at a random place and time in history, to see what a typical person's life might have been like then. Unfortunately I was born in 1403 in the valley of Mexico and died at age 4 from dysentery.

anyhumanever.com

Any Human Ever

One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived.

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Justus Robertson @justusrobertson.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I repost about it too! If anyone wants to know more, check out my paper "Game Simulacra Construction from Gameplay Video with a Multimodal LLM" at the IEEE Conference on Games (cog2026.org), and the conference in general. It's a great venue and research community!

cog2026.org

CoG 2026

IEEE Conference on Games 2026

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Last but not least of our IEEE Conference on Games papers this year: PuzzleJax, presented by @smearle.bsky.social with Yuchen Li, @amidos2006.bsky.social Graham Todd, Muhammad Nasir, Andrzej Banburski-Fahey and myself. Spoiler: LLMs are NOT GOOD at PuzzleScript games. Search is good, and RL decent.

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

@amidos2006.bsky.social presenting our work (led by Matt Siper) on Procedural Content Metageneration via Continual Abstraction Discovery here at IEEE Conference on Games

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

@risi.bsky.social keynoting IEEE CoG, and asking whether we now have the ingredients we need to create a new Creatures (the revolutionary artificial life game from the 90s) but where the creatures actually think

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Opus 4.5, released back in late November 2025, is widely seen as a step change in agentic capabilities, particularly for coding. Today, at least 11 companies have released models that are equally good or better.

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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

A 2026 update to my Institutions Active in Technical Games Research ranking, which looks at who publishes in the conferences and journals run by & for the CS-and-games community (AIIDE, CHI Play, FDG, IEEE ToG, etc.).

kmjn.org

Institutions Active in Technical Games Research

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

AMODEI OPUS OPUS DEI Coincidence? I think yes

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AIIDE @aiide.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

What about AIIDE 2027 in your city? The call for host proposal for AIIDE 2027 is open! Deadlines (11:59 PM AoE): - Proposal Deadline: October 2nd, 2026 - Proposal Notification: October 16th, 2026 Learn More: sites.google.com/view/aiide20...

sites.google.com

AIIDE 2026 - Call for AIIDE 2027 Hosts

The AIIDE 2026 organizing committee hereby invites proposals to host the 23rd AAAI Conference on Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2027), to be held some time during the months of September to ...

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Reposted by Julian Togelius

beetle moses @beetlemoses.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

A New Color (1/5🧵)

Page 1: A man is walking home, smoking a cigarette, being quietly trailed by a UFO above him. As he enters his apartment, two aliens watch from inside the ship. Alien 1, who has a large head, says, “that’s him. Let’s move.”

Page 2: The man walks upstairs as the aliens watch from the entrance of the building. The man enters his apartment and greets his little dog. Suddenly there is a knock at the door.

Page 3: he peers through his peephole, and sees the two aliens standing in the hallway. Alien 1 is holding a briefcase. From behind him, the voice of alien one: “don’t scream.”

Page 4: The aliens are seated across the room on the man’s couch. Sadie is in her bed next to them. Alien 1 says, “you’re not in any danger. Have a seat.” The man looks at his dog and thinks, “sadie is unusually calm.” Alien 1: don’t scream, or it’s a problem.

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

A personal essay about how I’ve been feeling and thinking about this new technology that I’m contributing to and what it might to do to us all. togelius.blogspot.com/2026/08/losi...

togelius.blogspot.com

Losing my religion

In spring 2025 I had a crisis of faith. I thought about what the technology I'm helping to create might do to our future, and got scared. M...

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

We got new cool stuff for ya. Especially if you're into PCG for games. Or genetic programming. Or agentic yada-yada, whatever it's called this month. What it is is an evolutionary loop that creates programs with LLMs, and abstracts reusable primitives. matt-quant-heads-io.github.io/procedural-c...

matt-quant-heads-io.github.io

Continual Abstraction Discovery

Evolving procedural content generators that discover their own reusable primitives.

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

If you want to watch a very good talk about Games, Goals, and Programs, I recommend Grahm Todd's PhD defense from last week. But I'm biased. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRQP...

youtube.com

Graham Todd's PhD defense

YouTube video by Julian Togelius

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False Knees @falseknees.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Intelligent

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

People dreamt that once all the information was online people would learn everything. They didn't want to do that, so we invented something that would.

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

How can you configure a spam filter so that obviously LLM-written emails go straight to spam? Is there a plugin? I’d pay for this.

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

It’s time for Graham Todd’s PhD defense!

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I’m surprised as to how much I agree with in Zuckerberg’s latest essay. Pretty reasonable over all. Now, it remains to be seen to what extent these principles will be put into practice. Meta’s past record is somewhat mixed. about.fb.com/news/2026/08...

about.fb.com

The Future is for Everyone

A letter from Mark Zuckerberg on the path to a positive AI future.

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

We’re all in this picture and I don’t like it

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I’ve basically given up on submitting federal grants. They were hard enough to get before and I only had limited success; now success is unknowable, maybe impossible.

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Clara Fernandez-Vara @clarafv.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Joseph’s Machines is brilliant and you should all watch his work.

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Celebrating Dr. Matt Siper, who passed his PhD defense yesterday, supervised by myself and @amidos2006.bsky.social !

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 20/07/2026

It won’t stop at math. Machines getting better at thinking through abstract problems than we are is going to be an emotional crisis for lots of people. I wish we were engaging that directly instead of having ridiculous shadow-debates about GPUs’ inherent thirst for water.

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Luke Dicken @luked.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

As someone who's sponsored this event for a few years (and can't any longer), I have to say if you're at all interested in access to some of the most gifted thinkers at the intersection of (real-not-bullshit) AI and Games, this is the event you should be putting your money into

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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

I’m proud to be part of this work, led by my PhD student @smearle.bsky.social and supervised by @risi.bsky.social. The question we ask is whether modern VLMs can exhibit the same kind of open-ended search and invention as humans when placed in the same mechanism

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Milton @miltonllera.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

One of my colleagues created this back when BS started gaining traction: bsky.app/starter-pack...

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