Tuesday, and the full conference gets going.
We started with a great keynote from Hector Zenil, on using Kolmogorov Complexity measures. Just because it is uncomputable doesn't mean it is useless. Most of mathematics is undecidable, but that doesn't stop us using maths! We shouldn't just give up and use simple lossless compression algorithms. We can do better, and getter better bounds, better approximations, by trying harder and harder (running the search algorithm for longer), which means we can be better at filtering out randomness from things that superficially look random, but that have algorithmic patterns. It was a fascinating talk. I've had Hector's book on Algorithmic Information Dynamics on my to-read pile for a while now -- I need to bump it up nearer to the top.
Then on to the contributed papers. During one of these, on Synthetic Ecosystems, I became one of today's "Lucky 10,000", when I discovered that until relatively recently, Ascension Island was an essentially lifeless desert. Darwin stopped there on his way home, and decided it needed "greening". Today, after a lot of work, it has a lush, totally artificial, ecosystem!
The poster session has lots of interesting work on display, including a contribution by my student. There were also some beautiful "Analogue Atomic Automata": large, carefully grown bismuth crystals, by Solvi Arnold:
In the evening we had a fascinating online keynote from Michael Levin, on biological embodiment, agential material, and bioengineering. It might have been 8pm for us, but it was 7am for him! (We live on a sphere.)
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