Bert Chan
@BertChakovsky
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Artificial life researcher @GoogleDeepMind (formerly Brain). Hongkonger. Neurodiversity is biodiversity.
Tokyo
Joined March 2018
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Inria 🇫🇷 master internship 2023 on Lenia x machine learning research is open, apply now!
Based on past projects, we will continue to train/evolve Lenia creatures for energy seeking, interactions, memory, learning, open-endedness, etc. 1/4
More info:
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This week I'm joining
@Google
Brain Tokyo as a research software engineer. My focus will be machine learning, complex systems and artificial life.
どうぞよろしく！
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Self-replicating pattern in discrete CA, a very rare (if not the first of its kind) finding by my friend Bo Yang. Unlike von Neumann's self-rep machine, "Outlier" is entirely emergent during a search for open-endedness, & shows signs of robustness.
Paper:
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I have a joke about Hong Kong politics, but ██ ███ ████ ████████ ██ ███ ███.
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In this fun project, we trained artificial life using machine learning!
Lenia creatures learn to survive obstacles using gradient descent (Neural CA) & curriculum learning (IMGEP), generalize well to unseen tasks.
Full video + blog post + interactive demo:
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Found these guys today. What are they doing here? An immune system? Emergence never cease to amaze us...
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I don't know if I will ever be a great researcher. I'm just an average rabbit hole enjoyer and if I see some beautiful rabbits I will show them to people, that's it.
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A person (Felix Wieler) found a new Lenia creature and emailed me the code. It's most probably a chaotic, shapeshifting version of an otherwise stable creature.
Sometimes it just stands there and elegantly looks around!
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Galactica: expected science but output bs -> taken down
ChatGPT: expected bs and output bs -> big hit
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Some rudimentary developmental biology in Lenia. Complex spore develops into full form, and the full form produce simple spores.
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Here is Colab notebook of "HANet", a reimplementation of
@hardmaru
's VAE+CPPN+GAN using TF2.0 with Keras. You can mix-and-match components into VAE, GAN, or VAE-GAN architecture.
Try out different layers and hyperparams!
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"From Conway to Lenia" notebook guides you step-by-step from discrete to continuous cellular automata, presented at
@ALifeConf
.
Thanks
@emergir_co
for idea!
Full:
Clean (without results):
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This absolute beauty in Lenia 3D is a rotating trigonal bipyramid, looks like some hybridized atomic orbitals.
I'm starting to call this "artificial physics"...
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Top 2 universities in Hong Kong - CUHK & HKU have recently got nicknames: Rioters' U and Revolution U.
The former was due to a malicious edit in Google Map (students welcome that!) and the latter came from a declaration to inherit alumni Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary legacy.
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We're desperate to find a success story in beating Coronavirus. But the China case, with its draconian measures and unreliable data, is not we can learn from. Look at S Korea for how to win a hard battle, Taiwan for resistance w/o WHO, and Hong Kong for civilian reactions. 1/
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I am greatly honored to receive the Outstanding Paper of 2019 from ISAL
@alifeofficial
for "Lenia: Biology of Artificial Life".
Greatest thanks to
@hardmaru
@Kriegmerica
@_tim_hutton_
@kyrre2000
@sina_lana
@pyoudeyer
et al. for discussions & warm supports up to this day. 1/4
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Complicated systems: intricate parts produce simple behaviors ⌚
Complex systems: simple parts produce intricate behaviors 🐟
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Object detection using scikit-image (realtime). Now can count the creatures and record stats one-by-one. This is the first step in analyzing their networking and collective behavior.
(music = listening during coding )
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Youtuber BirdBrain made a fascinating video about CA, SmoothLife and Lenia. And as always, Youtubers explain things better than me!
They re-implemented Lenia as a Rust library/crate (repo bellow), and also discovered a few fun configurations.
Video:
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a bit like Flow Lenia... but the equation is different.
i really like the internal structures
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The secret life of virtual creatures...
Using the new object detection on the Game of Life and simple Lenia patterns, reveals the hidden perception behind their self-organizing capability (or in Randall Beer's word, their "cognitive domains")
Music:
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Try combine 3D and multi-neighborhood method, some fish immediately pop up in my screen.
I'm using depth-first search to find interesting forms. The evolutionary diversity is astonishing, it feels like diving under an undiscovered ocean 🐟🐠🐙🦀
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We've made a new demo for Lenia in EvoJAX!
Lenia creatures can be optimized with various criteria using evolutionary algorithms like CMA-ES & PGPE.
Notebook:
We will talk about it in the ALIFE-Japan workshop tomorrow, details:
The Alife workshop’s schedule updated!
FYI our tutorial on EvoJAX w/
@BertChakovsky
and
@yujin_tang
is scheduled from 15:30 to 18:00.
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Exponential growth in the virtual world (multi-kernel Lenia)
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So lucky to have the chance to work with the legendary
@hardmaru
! Just half a year ago I wouldn't imagine such a parallel universe exists...
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A variant of the pacman with a healthy gut, viewed in "x-ray" mode (growth view)
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A nice interactive tutorial of critical threshold in complex systems. In the simplest form it's cellular automata with random rules, but can be used to easily explain real world cases e.g. herd immunity.
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Spatio-temporal structure of a video
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a Mandelbrot Set moment for the Game of Life
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SELF-REPLICATION discovered in Lenia. You can witness the moment of mitosis.
Using
@SoftologyComAu
's idea of multiple neighborhood, it injects dissonance into the structures, opens the door to more interesting phenomena.
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@ericjang11
Lenia can also be quite discrete, like these guys with 10 states and sizes ~20x20. They self-reproduce and maintain stability (homeostasis / allostasis), but the mechanism is "statistical" rather than deterministic in usual discrete CAs
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As a newbie to machine learning,
@hardmaru
's VAE+CPPN+GAN is the best exercise to get my hands dirty. So far managed to recreate VAE+CPPN (w/o GAN) using TF 2.0 alpha on Google Colab. I guess the beautiful ink-like effect needs more efficient training to avoid over-fitting.
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I will give a remote seminar talk about Lenia and artificial life at Stanford next Wed. Live webcast (later YouTube archive) will be available at:
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Large scale ALife simulation is amazing! I'm working towards a similar system for cellular automata, but it needs so much compute power...
Tech demo video for the latest version of the
#ArtificialLife
simulator alien. It's open source and available at .
#CUDA
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New work on Lenia submitted to
@ALifeConf
2020 is now on arXiv. Let me know what you think!
(code will be updated soon) 1/4
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Snake 3D™ is now available as a mini-game* in Lenia! Brings back the memories of the Nokia age!
* snake control not included
It's actually a cellular automata pattern with "restricted infinite growth". Its ability to eat dots and elongate is just a coincidence ... or is it?
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My work featured in
@depthsofwiki
🤩
I remember it was removed right after adding (too artistic?), then wikipedians suggested to improve e.g. turn text into hyperlinks – lots of work but worth it. That's how contributing to Wikipedia is both frustrating & fulfilling 😌
I looooove this clickable metro-style map of metabolic pathways. and someone made it for free, for strangers
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Just found this spooky creature, the phantom disk bug (𝑂𝑟𝑏𝑖𝑢𝑚 𝑝ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑠𝑚𝑎), only live in diluted time (Δt < 0.025). Good for halloween decorations 👻🎃
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Master internship is now open at Inria 🇫🇷 for Lenia × machine learning! Join us to train Lenia creatures to collect food, interact with the environment, develop memory, evolve embodied agency.
Other internships also open.
Details:
@FlowersINRIA
is proposing several
#research
#internships
at the Master level:
Keywords:
#Alife
#ComplexSystems
#ArtificialIntelligence
#MachineLearning
#Emergence
#Language
#ReinforcementLearning
#MultiAgent
👉 Full descriptions and how to apply:
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Playing with parameters 😗
Emergence is truly a fascinating thing, one moment you mess with random fluid systems, and the other moment cellular life emerges. Yeah, those things even have a cell structure, idk how that happened, but its amazing.
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Very relatable read.
When porting my code to JAX, with just a few afternoons & lazy calls to jit() & pmap(), it achieved 100x performance & full GPU utilization. What can i complain?
The real value is the faster iteration of ideas & experimentations.
“Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and quality than those working with lower-level languages.”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete.
The counter-intuitive rise of Python in scientific computing, an essay:
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Elegnant dance in the NumPy ocean.
Evolved from 3D Snake™ by just 2 mutations away, this creature looks more like a baby eel or comb jellyfish.
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July is the Month of Artificial Life! 👾👽🤖
(1) July 19-23:
@ALifeConf
2021
Me & Will Cavendish will hold a tutorial session about Lenia & open science. We'll show new demos & discuss 5 grand challenges.
Also don't miss
@zzznah
's Neural CA tutorial!
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Very delighted to see my first paper on the cover of Complex Systems, a journal founded by one of my hero
@stephen_wolfram
whose book "A New Kind of Science" inspired me a lot since childhood.
I should expand it into a few more works.. or PhD?🤖
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Short showcase of "asymptotic Lenia" presented at
@ALifeConf
(with correct credits)
The neat thing is that this system can be fully described by a "partial integro-differential equation"
∂/∂t A − G(K*A) + A = 0
Anyone knows what this equation could mean?
Kawaguchi just presented a different formulation of Lenia. It introduces asymptotics in rule update and thus can realize smooth/complex behavior/structure of organisms. Bert Chan created a nice movie just before the presentation.
#ALIFE2021
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Tomorrow I will give a keynote "Strange Attractors of Strange Attractors" at the Distributed Ghost 👻 workshop
#ALIFE2023
@HudcovaBarbora
@SidneyPontesF
@mikkelhei
Also, we are organising:
🔥The Distributed Ghost - Cellular Automata, Distributed Dynamical Systems, and Their Applications to Intelligence
27/7 at 10:10-11:30 & 13:00-14:20
co-organised by
@HirokiSayama
@NehanivCL
@EricMedvetTs
M. Pavone & myself
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Finally set foot in Hong Kong Google office and having some dim sum. Food is yum as rumoured 😋
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Try making a twitter moment for the progress of Lenia project 🤔
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Amazing talk by
@miquai
at
@ALifeConf
! About the Fermi paradox aka why we can't see aliens. Perhaps successful civilizations bypassed extinction by repeatedly achieving homeostasis (thru bio/tech evolution) and are indistinguishable from nature? (thus no galactic Type 3 civs)
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Hi ALife / tech twitter, which is the best technology for CA simulation on a large 1024x1024 grid (better online & realtime), involving GPU, matrix ops & FFT?
I heard about WebGL, regl, three.js, WASM (also OpenGL, Vulkan for desktop), which is the best rabbit hole to jump into?
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ALife discovered in 3D Lenia world!
This jellyfish-ish creature, moving towards the screen, is similar to those in 3D SmoothLife, discovered exactly 8 years ago by Stephen Rafler
X'mas gift from an alien world 🎁👽 1/4
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1D 3-channel Lenia with mass conservation
made with the Lenia engine (work in progress)
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Best paper award 🏆 goes to...
@eplantec
's Flow Lenia, with
@hamongautier
@mayalen_etc
@pyoudeyer
@Clement_MF_
and me
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Finally at Tokyo office. Let's go grab a coffee/beer if you're near by!
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Spotted some mini Strandbeest near ALIFE-Japan workshop in Tsukuba.
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Tons of fun at
@tiltfive
with
@jeriellsworth
showcasing their AR gaming console, and all the retro machines for nerdy nerds 🤤
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Back to home from work and see the kids playing sketch-RNN and slime volleyball (they're supposed to do homework).. How did they find that website? 🧐
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This is me and my daughter 5 years ago, during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. It was on a newspaper front page, symbolizing our future generation.
The occupy movement eventually failed: Beijing denied universal suffrage that was promised. Well... what did we expect? 1/n
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The 2 approaches of embodiment in AI & ALife research: the "mechanist" view (e.g. in robotics, reinforcement learning) assumes agents with fixed sensors/actuators/brains, the "enactivist" view allows agents to emerge... but they're vague & fragile. We go for the latter way.
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Looks like different trees can sense the boundaries with each other? But how?
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Takako just presented "asymptotic Lenia" at
@ALifeConf
, a variant that creates perfectly smooth creatures 😀
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Next level of emergence! (grid cells => individual dots => circular groups => emergent swarms)
cc
@drmichaellevin
This video is NOT:
- A life form
- A particle simulation
- An agent-based model
- A physics engine
It's a 'Selective' Multiple Neighborhood
#CellularAutomata
(
#MNCA
) pattern, run on a RX 6800XT GPU in
#VulkanAutomata
.
A bit different to Conway's
#GameOfLife
, huh? 😁
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Beautiful visuals, in-depth explanations, credible sources, clear data charts, and a heart with empathy, are what make visual journalism great.
#FreeHongKong
Hong Kong's "Summer of Dissent" [thread]. I'm starting a series of illustrations to explain some of the context of the current protests. I think what is happening right now is history in the making and I want to add perspective to some of the reporting I've seen.
#hongkongprotest
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The legendary place where Einstein walked with Gödel everyday
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Interesting analog computer:
Love the color coding in the doc.
But can it do cellular automata or reaction-diffusion?
Analog computing making a comeback (about time). Differential equations like the Lorenz attractor system simulated by analog electrical circuits. Cool! -->
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Why are we only discussing if there's any consciousness inside ChatGPT, but not in Stable Diffusion, MusicLM, etc?
In other words, are we so used to attribute consciousness and intelligence to language, how about visual thinking and other modalities?
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Remarkably, this emergent mega-structure is not unlike Langton's Loops or
@HirokiSayama
's Evoloops. Coincidence or not?
Today I celebrate the 25th birthday of evoloops, the 1st CA-based ALife that shows Darwinian evolution (by variation & natural selection) within a deterministic universe. This remains one of the best creations I made in my life. 1/7
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On the left is a ctenophore (comb jelly) video from
@MontereyAq
, on the right is 𝐶𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑢𝑚 𝑖𝑟𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑠 (rainbow comb bug) from artificial life Lenia. The name is due to its shape, the resemblance is purely coincidental.
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Exploring patterns in "Flow Lenia" with mass conservation. Seems like it's switching between different scales? (Joint project with
@FlowersINRIA
)
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Conway's Goldberg Machine
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Emergence of Informative Higher Scales in Biological Systems by
@erikphoel
&
@drmichaellevin
Discuss how information theory helps to identify the best causal emergence scale to model a biological system.
The macro-scale gene network on the right wins.
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When great people share your work, a funny feeling that it's no longer a personal toy, but now a public project that you're responsible for its maintenance and future. You're now... a dad.
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These 2 videos come from our on-going Flow Lenia project (). Mass conservation mechanism in Lenia allows us to easier design environmental features (e.g. energy pellets, obstacles) and achieve interspecies interactions. Paper coming soon. 2/4
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I will be giving two talks about Lenia, artificial life and evolutionary computing on 24 Nov
@pyconhk
(am) and
@hkcodeconf
(pm) in Hong Kong. Join us if you're near by!
(image: new shapeshifting species -- my daughter named it the Naughty Squiggle)
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The tanh() soft clip function leaves a thin "aura" around patterns, so that they can sense each other from a distance. With a few rounds of evolution, some of them started to show predator-prey behavior.
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Code release for extended Lenia (v3.5) together with original Lenia (v3.0):
Forgive me for not having much doc/comments, as this serves mostly as my "backyard lab".
This also marks the conclusion of this stage. Next stop: neural Lenia (?)
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Play with the demo & read the research at:
Thanks to Inria team
@hamongautier
@mayalen_etc
@nisioti_eleni
@ClementRomac
@Clement_MF_
@pyoudeyer
Special thanks to
@zzznah
@drmichaellevin
In our next project, we may add food... 🍰🍩🍒😋
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Besides generalists & specialists, I hope there's also space for "novelization" or diversification in ML research, i.e. optimize for doing strange stuff (that can be further developed later)
Rosanne referred to one of my tweets about the tradeoff between generalization / specialization in research, and she described it better than me in context.
There is immense value that is contributed by generalists in research fields.
The earlier thread:
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Thanks to all your technical advices, I'm digging into shaders & GPU... Made a few trials at
, also using
With a huge canvas & decent fps, now it's possible to observe large scale behaviors in real time!
Hi ALife / tech twitter, which is the best technology for CA simulation on a large 1024x1024 grid (better online & realtime), involving GPU, matrix ops & FFT?
I heard about WebGL, regl, three.js, WASM (also OpenGL, Vulkan for desktop), which is the best rabbit hole to jump into?
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At
@ALifeConf
,
@khoribe3
talks about what happens if we squash the creatures in Particle Lenia (by
@zzznah
)
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Newly discovered 𝑇𝑒𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑠𝑦𝑛𝑜𝑟𝑏𝑖𝑢𝑚 (four fused orb). Easily broken down by small changes.
#Lenia
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