4 billion years ago the earth was bombarded with photons, a short while later a Tesla got launched into space. This week I'm speaking to Professor Keith Downing about emergent phenomena; which the above scenario is a prime example of, alongside the formation of a baby from a fertilised egg, economies from individual interactions and for good measure alcohol from respiring yeast! 

Full synopsis:

0:00 - Intro
1:20 - Emergence and emergent systems
13:20 - Evolution and its algorithms
23:40 - Theory of facilitated variation
31:30 - Neural Information vs Synthetic Information 
41:30 - Evolutionary computation vs Neural networks
48:25 - Re-enforcement learning
1:02:15 - Building intelligence - neural net architectures
1:07:00 - Advice and Book recommendations