{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,3]],"date-time":"2026-02-03T04:26:29Z","timestamp":1770092789614,"version":"3.49.0"},"publisher-location":"New York, NY, USA","reference-count":38,"publisher":"ACM","content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":[],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,21]]},"DOI":"10.1145\/3787256.3787274","type":"proceedings-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,2]],"date-time":"2026-02-02T16:23:12Z","timestamp":1770049392000},"page":"119-126","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["ZapGPT: Free-form Language Prompting for Simulated Cellular Control."],"prefix":"10.1145","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6862-9257","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Nam H.","family":"Le","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1303-3701","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Patrick","family":"Erickson","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Biology, Tufts University, Boston, MA, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-4975-1975","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yanbo","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Biology, Tufts University, Boston, MA, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7292-8084","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Michael","family":"Levin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Biology, Tufts University, Boston, MA, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8515-0822","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Josh","family":"Bongard","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,2]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_2_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"Dany\u00a0S. Adams and Michael Levin. 2012. Endogenous voltage gradients as mediators of cell-cell communication: strategies for investigating bioelectrical signals during pattern formation. Cell and Tissue Research 352 1 (Feb. 2012) 95\u2013122. 10.1007\/s00441-012-1329-4","DOI":"10.1007\/s00441-012-1329-4"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_3_2","volume-title":"arXiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2204.01691","author":"Ahn Michael","year":"2022","unstructured":"Michael Ahn, Anthony Brohan, and Noah\u00a0Brown et al.2022. Do As I Can and Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances. In arXiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2204.01691."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_4_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Mark\u00a0A Bedau John\u00a0S McCaskill Norman\u00a0H Packard Steen Rasmussen Chris Adami David\u00a0G Green Takashi Ikegami Kunihiko Kaneko and Thomas\u00a0S Ray. 2000. Open problems in artificial life. Artificial life 6 4 (2000) 363\u2013376.","DOI":"10.1162\/106454600300103683"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_5_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Jaime\u00a0A Berkovich and Markus\u00a0J Buehler. 2024. Lifegpt: Topology-agnostic generative pretrained transformer model for cellular automata. arXiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2409.12182 (2024).","DOI":"10.1038\/s44387-025-00014-w"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_6_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Hans-Georg Beyer and Hans-Paul Schwefel. 2002. Evolution strategies\u2013a comprehensive introduction. Natural computing 1 (2002) 3\u201352.","DOI":"10.1023\/A:1015059928466"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_7_2","unstructured":"Anthony Brohan Noah Brown Justice Carbajal Yevgen Chebotar Xi Chen Krzysztof Choromanski Tianli Ding Danny Driess Avinava Dubey Chelsea Finn et\u00a0al. 2023. Rt-2: Vision-language-action models transfer web knowledge to robotic control. arXiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2307.15818 (2023)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_8_2","unstructured":"Scott Camazine Jean-Louis Deneubourg Nigel Franks J Sneyd Eric Bonabeau and Guy Theraulaz. 2001. Self-Organization in Biological Systems. (2001)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_9_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"D.\u00a0Ewen Cameron Caleb\u00a0J. Bashor and James\u00a0J. Collins. 2014. A brief history of synthetic biology. Nature Reviews Microbiology 12 5 (April 2014) 381\u2013390. 10.1038\/nrmicro3239","DOI":"10.1038\/nrmicro3239"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_10_2","unstructured":"Mark Chen Jerry Tworek Heewoo Jun Qiming Yuan Henrique Ponde De\u00a0Oliveira Pinto Jared Kaplan Harri Edwards Yuri Burda Nicholas Joseph Greg Brockman et\u00a0al. 2021. Evaluating large language models trained on code. arXiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2107.03374 (2021)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_11_2","volume-title":"Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter","author":"Deacon Terrence\u00a0W","year":"2011","unstructured":"Terrence\u00a0W Deacon. 2011. Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. WW Norton & Company."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_12_2","first-page":"4171","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 2019 conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: human language technologies, volume 1 (long and short papers)","author":"Devlin Jacob","year":"2019","unstructured":"Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. 2019. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of the 2019 conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: human language technologies, volume 1 (long and short papers). 4171\u20134186."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_13_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"Michael\u00a0B. Elowitz and Stanislas Leibler. 2000. A synthetic oscillatory network of transcriptional regulators. Nature 403 6767 (Jan. 2000) 335\u2013338. 10.1038\/35002125","DOI":"10.1038\/35002125"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_14_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Stevan Harnad. 1990. The symbol grounding problem. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 42 1-3 (1990) 335\u2013346.","DOI":"10.1016\/0167-2789(90)90087-6"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_15_2","unstructured":"Yuanming Hu Luke Anderson Tzu-Mao Li Qi Sun Nathan Carr Jonathan Ragan-Kelley and Fr\u00e9do Durand. 2019. Difftaichi: Differentiable programming for physical simulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/1910.00935 (2019)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_16_2","unstructured":"Akarsh Kumar Chris Lu Louis Kirsch Yujin Tang Kenneth\u00a0O Stanley Phillip Isola and David Ha. 2024. Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2412.17799 (2024)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_17_2","unstructured":"Christopher\u00a0G Langton. 1997. Artificial life: An overview. (1997)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_18_2","unstructured":"Nam\u00a0H. Le Patrick Erikson Yanbo Zhang Michael Levin and Josh Bongard. 2025. Giving Simulated Cells a Voice: Evolving Prompt-to-Intervention Models for Cellular Control. arxiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2505.02766\u00a0[cs.AI] https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2505.02766"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_19_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Nam\u00a0H Le Michael Levin Richard\u00a0A Watson Josh Bongard and Christopher\u00a0L Buckley. 2025. Emergent Collective Reproduction via Evolving Neuronal Flocks. Northeast Journal of Complex Systems (NEJCS) 7 2 (2025) 8.","DOI":"10.63562\/2577-8439.1109"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_20_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"Michael Levin. 2012. Morphogenetic fields in embryogenesis regeneration and cancer: Non-local control of complex patterning. Biosystems 109 3 (Sept. 2012) 243\u2013261. 10.1016\/j.biosystems.2012.04.005","DOI":"10.1016\/j.biosystems.2012.04.005"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_21_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Michael Levin. 2021. Bioelectric signaling: Reprogrammable circuits underlying embryogenesis regeneration and cancer. Cell 184 8 (2021) 1971\u20131989.","DOI":"10.1016\/j.cell.2021.02.034"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_22_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"Shengchao Liu Yanjing Li Zhuoxinran Li Anthony Gitter Yutao Zhu Jiarui Lu Zhao Xu Weili Nie Arvind Ramanathan Chaowei Xiao Jian Tang Hongyu Guo and Anima Anandkumar. 2025. A text-guided protein design framework. Nature Machine Intelligence 7 4 (March 2025) 580\u2013591. 10.1038\/s42256-025-01011-z","DOI":"10.1038\/s42256-025-01011-z"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_23_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/IROS40897.2019.8967639"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_24_2","unstructured":"Mistral AI. 2024. Mistral-Small-3.1-24B-Instruct-2503. https:\/\/huggingface.co\/mistralai\/Mistral-Small-3.1-24B-Instruct-2503. Accessed: 2025-05-06."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_25_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1093\/oso\/9780195124415.001.0001"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_26_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1162\/isal_a_00759"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_27_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Giovanni Pezzulo and Michael Levin. 2016. Top-down models in biology: explanation and control of complex living systems above the molecular level. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 13 124 (2016) 20160555.","DOI":"10.1098\/rsif.2016.0555"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_28_2","unstructured":"Ben Poole Ajay Jain Jonathan\u00a0T Barron and Ben Mildenhall. 2022. Dreamfusion: Text-to-3d using 2d diffusion. arXiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2209.14988 (2022)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_29_2","first-page":"8748","volume-title":"International conference on machine learning","author":"Radford Alec","year":"2021","unstructured":"Alec Radford, Jong\u00a0Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh, Gabriel Goh, Sandhini Agarwal, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Pamela Mishkin, Jack Clark, et\u00a0al. 2021. Learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision. In International conference on machine learning. PmLR, 8748\u20138763."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_30_2","unstructured":"Alec Radford Karthik Narasimhan Tim Salimans Ilya Sutskever et\u00a0al. 2018. Improving language understanding by generative pre-training. (2018)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_31_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D19-1410"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_32_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Michael Rubenstein Alejandro Cornejo and Radhika Nagpal. 2014. Programmable self-assembly in a thousand-robot swarm. Science 345 6198 (2014) 795\u2013799.","DOI":"10.1126\/science.1254295"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_33_2","unstructured":"Noah Shinn Federico Cassano Ashwin Gopinath Karthik Narasimhan and Shunyu Yao. 2023. Reflexion: Language agents with verbal reinforcement learning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (2023) 8634\u20138652."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_34_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ricard Sol\u00e9 Daniel\u00a0R Amor Salva Duran-Nebreda N\u00faria Conde-Pueyo Max Carbonell-Ballestero and Raul Monta\u00f1ez. 2016. Synthetic collective intelligence. Biosystems 148 (2016) 47\u201361.","DOI":"10.1016\/j.biosystems.2016.01.002"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_35_2","unstructured":"Romal Thoppilan Daniel De\u00a0Freitas Jamie Hall Noam Shazeer Apoorv Kulshreshtha Heng-Tze Cheng Alicia Jin Taylor Bos Leslie Baker Yu Du et\u00a0al. 2022. Lamda: Language models for dialog applications. arXiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2201.08239 (2022)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_36_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.4324\/9781315675213-11"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_37_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v37i4.25662"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_38_2","unstructured":"Wenhao Yu and Gileadi et al.2023. Language to Rewards for Robotic Skill Synthesis. Arxiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2306.08647 (2023)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_1_39_2","unstructured":"Fanlong Zeng Wensheng Gan Yongheng Wang Ning Liu and Philip\u00a0S Yu. 2023. Large language models for robotics: A survey. arXiv preprint arXiv:https:\/\/arXiv.org\/abs\/2311.07226 (2023)."}],"event":{"name":"CIIS 2025: 2025 The 8th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Systems","location":"Okayama , Japan","acronym":"CIIS 2025"},"container-title":["Proceedings of the 2025 8th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Systems"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3787256.3787274","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,2]],"date-time":"2026-02-02T16:24:00Z","timestamp":1770049440000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3787256.3787274"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,21]]},"references-count":38,"alternative-id":["10.1145\/3787256.3787274","10.1145\/3787256"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/3787256.3787274","relation":{},"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,21]]},"assertion":[{"value":"2026-02-02","order":3,"name":"published","label":"Published","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}}]}}