Joshua Bongard
Joshua Bongard worked on designing living systems by computer evolution, and on theory that treats biological material as a machine. With Kriegman, Blackiston and Levin, Bongard described a pipeline that evolves cell-based designs in silico and manufactures them1. With Levin, Bongard defined polycomputing4. Bongard is also a co-author on a 2025 tissue information study8.
- In the library
- 4 works, named in 6 passages elsewhere
- Facts from
- ORCID
Designing living machines
The 2020 pipeline takes a description of biological building blocks and a desired behaviour, then outputs living systems that embody it1. Designs were evolved over 100 independent trials, selected on net displacement during a 10-second period with randomized contraction at 2 Hz2. The built organisms reproduced both the structure and the behaviour of the in silico designs, even though the timing of heart muscle cells was modelled as random noise. Selection for locomotion produced shapes that reduced the effect of that noise3. The authors note that robustness to random noise is common in biology.
Polycomputing and machine views
In the 2023 paper with Levin, polycomputing is provisionally defined as one material giving the results of more than one computation in the same place at the same time4. The authors argue that living systems do this because each level and component acts as an observer, interpreting the mechanisms around it in its own way5. Levin later cited Bongard and Levin for the machine analogy in biology. In that account the genome fixes the hardware, while electrical activity supplies context-sensitive software7.
Use by later authors
Levin's 2022 framework cites Bongard and Levin (2021) for the aim of finding deep invariants between very different kinds of agents, setting aside composition or origin6. Bongard is also a co-author on a 2025 study of aneural tissue. It uses functional connectivity networks, built from statistical dependencies between activity in different areas, to look for information structure8. The passages do not say which parts of that study Bongard carried out.
Here, we demonstrate a scalable approach for designing living systems in silico using an evolutionary algorithm, and we show how the evolved designs can be rapidly manufactured using a cell-based construction toolkit.
Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J, 2020 · A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms · open at passage 4designs were selected based on net displacement achieved during a 10-s period (with randomized, phase-modulated contraction, cycling at 2 Hz).
Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J, 2020 · A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms · open at passage 12As a side effect of selection pressure for locomotion, derandomizing morphologies evolved: evolutionary improvement occurred through changes in overall shape,
Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J, 2020 · A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms · open at passage 18We provisionally define polycomputing as the ability of a material to provide the results of more than one computation in the same place at the same time.
Bongard J, Levin M, 2023 · There's Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded… · open at passage 4Each level and component of a living system are simultaneously observers and hackers, interpreting and taking advantage of different aspects of the mechanisms in their microenvironments, in parallel.
Bongard J, Levin M, 2023 · There's Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded… · open at passage 12The goal of this project is to identify deep invariants between cognitive systems of very different types of agents, and abstract away from inessential features such as composition or origin
Levin M, 2022 · Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework… · open at passage 23While the genome encodes the hardware (the cellular affordances, such as ion channels), the actual outcome is the result of context- and experience-sensitive electrophysiological software that this hardware supports
Levin M, 2023 · Bioelectric networks: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from… · open at passage 37FC networks are weighted, undirected networks generated based on instantaneous statistical correlations, or statistical dependencies, between activity in different areas of a system.
Blackiston D, Dromiack H, Grasso C, Varley TF, Moore DG…, 2025 · Revealing non-trivial information structures in aneural biological tissues via… · open at passage 4
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