Eiji Watanabe Lab @ NIBB, Japan

Science progresses slowly, but occasionally jumps forward when a new discovery reveals that some common knowledge was based on wrong assumptions. Can fake discoveries also reveal shaky assumptions?   We write a short "breaking news"-like text reporting on an impossible discovery. You make up a plausible scientific explanation. Submission deadline: February 28th, 2022 - 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (AoE) Judges:  @Neuro_Skeptic @eijwat @sina_lana THE FICTION SCIENCE CONTEST

Why do we sometimes perceive static images as if they were moving? Visual motion illusions enjoy a sustained popularity, yet there is no definitive answer to the question of why they work. We present a generative model, the Evolutionary Illusion GENerator (EIGen), that creates new visual motion illusions. The structure of EIGen supports the hypothesis that illusory motion might be the result of perceiving the brain's own predictions rather than perceiving raw visual input from the eyes. The scientific motivation of this paper is to demonstrate that the perception of illusory motion could be a side effect of the predictive abilities of the brain. The philosophical motivation of this paper is to call attention to the untapped potential of "motivated failures", ways for artificial systems to fail as biological systems fail, as a worthy outlet for Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life research. "Evolutionary Generation of Visual Motion Illusions" Lana Sinapaye...