Takashi Ikegami

Takashi Ikegami has worked in artificial life and complex systems for more than three decades. His central question is how life-like properties — autonomy, agency, open-ended evolution, and selfhood — emerge from collective and embodied dynamics rather than being designed in. Current work spans the LLM-driven humanoid robot ALTER3 and its capacities for imitation, self-recognition, and agency; large-scale Boids and swarm models of emergent superorganisms; collective intelligence and a “Community First” view in which individuality arises out of collective organization, studied across ant colonies, honeybee hives, and Tetrahymena populations; and information-theoretic measures of autonomy and selfhood, including non-trivial information closure (NTIC). A continuing thread connects this science to art, exhibiting androids and generative systems internationally.