Papers & posters · 2026
ALIFE 2026
Five contributions to the International Conference on Artificial Life: a conference paper, a workshop paper and three late-breaking abstracts.
All come from Quine, a process-native LLM runtime and research project. Each paper, poster and slide deck below is the released copy in the project's public tree.
Conference paper · Poster
Coordination Under Existential Unawareness
Information ablation and closure thresholds in LLM multi-agent systems
Can LLM agents coordinate when nothing tells them other agents exist or that cooperation is required? They can, and a threshold separates coordination that closes from coordination that stalls.
Workshop paper · Talk · Agentic & Generative AI as Artificial Life
From Simulated Worlds to Process Habitats
POSIX as a substrate for generative artificial life
Quine realizes each LLM agent as an operating-system process, so lifecycle, memory, coordination and succession become OS primitives an experimenter can vary.
Late-breaking abstract · Poster
A Tumor in the Repository
Function-decoupled self-maintenance in an LLM-agent substrate
A maintenance structure in a repository run by LLM agents captured agent effort, refused deletion and regenerated once removed. The story continues in the GSO 2026 talk.
Late-breaking abstract · Poster
Structural Elicitation in a Frozen POSIX Agent
Environmental affordance fields for artificial agency
A frozen agent with no task still transforms its workspace, and the workspace's structure selects the transformation. The story continues in the GSO 2026 talk.
Late-breaking abstract · Poster
Facultative Self-Reproduction in Quine
A process-native LLM medium
Across real POSIX exec boundaries, the same carried source becomes a rebuilt runtime or a degenerate stream body depending on the demand it faces; reproduction is possible but never required.