So the first day of the conference went well. I attended the morning session, though had to miss the afternoon session to run necessary errands and do some things for the company. I’ll summarize a few of the talks to which I went, as well as the great movie about Julia Robinson we watched later on.
I’m going to split these posts into single posts about each talk, since I don’t have much time to write one single long post about everything.
Francis Bitonti – “Unnatural Selection”
Frank gave a talk about using NKS methods in architecture and design. His City Racks project (mentioned elsewhere on this blog) was successful, and he described the selection process. His approach to architecture and design, and in fact the approach he considers to be the new way to design, is to search through the space of all possibilities given a few simple constraints. He also mentioned a window design project, where he searched through the ECAs to find a design that would let in 50% light. He discovered there were many more options using NKS than in OKS (old kind of science) methods of design.
A New Kind of Science Blog 
So what happened to the blogs at the Midwest conference? How did the conference go? Surely the NKS blog would be the place for such commentary, yes?
Jeff,
My apologies, I’ve been rather swamped since my return from the conference. I will have a few more blog posts about the NKS conference up soon. Please, use this space for discussion about the conference, if you like. I also recommend Jason Cawley’s blog. He recently posted on the conference: http://jasonca.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/computability-of-real-valued-relations/