TAM – the finale
The last day of TAM is always for paper presentations. Months before the meeting JREF asked people to submit papers, and a number are chosen to present them at TAM.
I’ve always found this to be the day that has “more meat, less filling” as it were. Presenters only have 25 minutes, most have no book to push, and are not famous so irrelevant questions aren’t asked of them. With only 25 minutes you don’t have much choice but to condense the work down to the main points. Sadly audience attendance isn’t as strong as the previous two days as many are burned-out from all the late nights or have early flights to catch. I’m guilty of this myself having missed the first two of the eight talks this year as I needed some extra sleep. I think I got to bed at 3:00am the previous night and the talks started at 8:30. On the plus side I did win money that night!
Anyway there was one paper that stood out for me – Lee Graham developed an Irreducible Complexity applet which was way cool. It takes a simple program for diverting falling balls down a grid and includes evolutionary mechanisms (occasional random mutation, death of algorithms whose scores are consistently poorer than others etc.) and then you can run it for numerous generations to see what happens. It serves as an interesting computer model for simple evolution by showing how complex structures could be possible over many generations.
Check it out.
1 comment:
sorry kiless, but if i recall correctly yours was one of the first two that day - which i missed because i slept in. oops.
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