From Engineer to Alchemist, There and Back Again: An Alchemist Tale

When computer science meets (bio)chemistry, a new world of possibilities emerges. Taking inspiration from mechanisms that exist in nature, and empowering them with the magic of computation, engineers become alchemists: they create new worlds, ruled by their own (bio)chemical rules. We will call such virtual worlds"computational ecosystems". In this talk we introduce Alchemist, a simulator developed by our research group in order to let us experiment with this complexity. Alchemist takes inspiration from chemical simulators and ABMs, trying to grab the best of both worlds by providing a fast, reliable and extensible framework. We will have a flyby of the simulator features, showing some case studies: crowd steering, crowd evacuation, morphogenesis, anticipative adaptation. The final part of the talk will frame the future activities, offering a pool of opportunities to those interested in this research area.