Flink Labs
Artefacts from the near future

Exploratory Artefacts

Artefacts from the near future.

Flink Labs makes working glimpses of possible futures: prototypes, simulations, agents, interfaces, visual systems, physical/digital objects, and demos that make emerging ideas visible, tactile and playful.

Not just notes. Not just code. Not just slides.

An artefact sits between an idea and a product.

It is something a team can look at, pick up, discuss, debate and build upon. Sometimes it is a simulation, sometimes a small agent, sometimes a physical/digital object, interface sketches, an AI model, working code, or strange little thing that makes a possible future easier to understand.

Artefacts are not final products. They are thinking tools: things you can see, touch, operate, compare, and talk from.

They move a question out of the abstract into the tangible here and now, where it can be judged with more care.

Pinnacle: Swarming Data Exploration

Pinnacle

Swarming Data Exploration

Playable Computation Knowledge, Memory and Learning

An interactive visual analytics tool where complex datasets become dynamic swarms that can be filtered, clustered, and explored spatially.

Pinnacle turns data analysis into something people can move through, manipulate, and understand visually, rather than reducing it to static dashboards and charts.

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Pinnacle allowed users to drag questions and variables onto a canvas, causing individual data points to behave like flocking agents. As different analytical dimensions were added, the swarm reorganised into clusters and formations, making patterns easier to see. The system combined swarm visualisation, automatic clustering, contour maps, traditional charts, predictive analytics, and AI-generated summaries. It explored how data interfaces might become more playful, spatial, and exploratory while still supporting serious analytical work.

C. elegans Connectome: A Living Neural Toy

C. elegans Connectome

A Living Neural Toy

Artificial Life and Digital Ecosystems Knowledge, Memory and Learning

A biologically inspired neural experiment using the mapped connectome of C. elegans as the basis for a small recurrent network.

This project turns a real nervous system into an inspectable experimental object for exploring structure, memory, sensation, and behaviour.

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We used the connectome data of C. elegans to construct a recurrent neural network inspired by the worm's biological structure. The work included different connection types, sensor-neuron stimulation, internal activity visualisation, spiking neural network experiments, Hebbian-style learning, neuron ablation, and simple classifier readouts. The project is continuing toward small behavioural environments, such as maze navigation and trail following, where the network can be tested as a living control system rather than just a diagram.

Tic-Tac-Toe Transformer: A Tiny Language Model

Tic-Tac-Toe Transformer

A Tiny Language Model

Playable Computation Knowledge, Memory and Learning

A transformer model built from scratch in PyTorch and trained on every possible tic-tac-toe game sequence.

By shrinking the problem down, this project made transformers, tokenisation, learned strategy, and model compression easier to inspect and understand.

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This project used tic-tac-toe as a compact laboratory for understanding transformer models from first principles. We built a tokenisation system and full transformer architecture from scratch, generated the complete space of possible game sequences, and trained the model on that constrained vocabulary. The trained model could play, analyse, and visualise games. We then explored binary neural network compression, including custom backpropagation and step-function handling, to investigate how far a small learned model could be reduced.

Agent Ecology: A Simulation Framework for Distributed Worlds

Agent Ecology

A Simulation Framework for Distributed Worlds

Distributed Intelligence Artificial Life and Digital Ecosystems

A reusable simulation framework for agents that move, communicate, leave traces, and interact inside layered environments.

Agent Ecology creates small working worlds where coordination, signalling, memory, and emergent behaviour can be observed over time.

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Agent Ecology combines a backend simulation system with an interactive frontend connected over WebSockets. The backend supports agents, layered environments, broadcast and unicast communication, pheromone-like traces, barriers, constraints, and world rules. The frontend allows the simulation to be paused, played, replayed, zoomed, inspected, and manipulated. It has been used for algorithm testing and provides a foundation for future work involving artificial life, worm-inspired behaviours, cooperative agents, and distributed intelligence.

Embedding Landscapes: Language, Themes, and Change Over Time

Embedding Landscapes

Language, Themes, and Change Over Time

Playable Computation Knowledge, Memory and Learning

A set of language analysis experiments that turn comments, stories, and feedback into navigable semantic landscapes.

Embedding Landscapes makes qualitative language visible, helping themes, risks, shifts, and urgent signals emerge from large bodies of text.

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This work uses tokenisation, embeddings, clustering, moving averages, 3D visualisation, and AI-assisted insight generation to explore language over time. In survey and healthcare settings, it helps surface themes, risks, urgent concerns, outliers, and changes in patient or customer feedback. In literary experiments using Sherlock Holmes stories, sentence embeddings revealed narrative shifts, such as movement between backstory and present action. The broader idea is to treat language as a landscape that can be explored, rather than as a pile of text to summarise.

Neural Cellular Automata: Memory, Robustness, and Local Rules

Neural Cellular Automata

Memory, Robustness, and Local Rules

Artificial Life and Digital Ecosystems Knowledge, Memory and Learning Distributed Intelligence

Experiments with neural cellular automata as self-organising systems for memory, learning, robustness, and distributed structure.

This work explores how intelligence can emerge from many small local interactions rather than one central model or controller.

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This project investigates cellular automata and neural cellular automata as ways of encoding information through local update rules. The work explores memory, regeneration, robustness, context, and distributed computation. We have tested these ideas through trail-following and maze-style tasks, including examples inspired by the Santa Fe Trail, and compared NCA-style approaches with small traditional neural networks. Future directions include groups of NCAs forming tile-like structures that may act as distributed, resilient stores of more complex information.

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Learning to Coordinate

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Learning to Coordinate

Distributed Intelligence Playable Computation

A set of reinforcement learning experiments where multiple agents learn to cooperate, coordinate, and communicate in simple environments.

This project explores how simple agents become groups, and how communication and reward structures shape collective behaviour.

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This work investigates cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning in grid-world-style environments. Rather than focusing only on adversarial behaviour, we explored shared tasks, cohort-like groupings, group rewards, and agents working together to move or organise objects. We also experimented with constrained emergent communication, where agents learned to use a small vocabulary to improve coordination. Built from scratch in PyTorch with supporting visualisations, the project gives us a practical base for studying cooperation, group intelligence, and distributed learning.

Curated artefacts and future experiments

Curated strangeness, not the whole universe.

The artefacts shown here are selected because they point toward the future Flink Labs is exploring.

Some are polished. Some are rough. Some are sketches. Some are working demos. All of them are attempts to make an idea visible enough to learn from.