Chaos Conference 2008

The first ever annual Chaotic Conference on Modelling and Simulating Chaos was taking place in Crete, near Chania. Dave, due to a horrible flight time table, had the rare honour of being one of the first, if not THE first, to arrive at the first ever conference of it's type, at around 7am.

So, what is Chaos? According to Wiki:

"In mathematics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain dynamical systems – that is, systems whose state evolves with time – that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos."

Clear? Good.

Academic conferences in general follow a simply layout. There are important talks, which usually last an hour, given by key speakers that everyone should attend. Then there are shorter 20 min talks given by people attending. Usually 4 or so of these talks happen at the same time and people must choose which talk they wish to see from the program. Dave was scheduled to give his talk at 10am on the second day of the conference. Each session is controlled by a chair person, who basically acts as a stopwatch.

Session 1, first day. No chair person shows up. 2 out of 4 of the speakers don't show up. The other "2" speakers turn out to be just 1 person giving 2 talks. These are presented with no idea of length of time.

Good start.

Session 2. The chair person IS the speaker, thus not having any idea of time. Another speaker doesn't show up, talks are given early due to this, anyone following the program in another room is missing the talks they wanted to hear here.

Hmm...

Dave's talk. Two speakers don't turn up before him, he gives the talk at 9:20am to an audience who have no idea what he is talking about and finishes 20 minutes before his actual audience is due to arrive.

...

Over the four days of talks, Dave personally counted 32 normal speakers going AWOL, 4 chair people not attending, the majority of sessions being chaired by a speaker, 1 "important" speaker sending his apologies, at least 3 computational difficulties, including one rather spectacular explosion of a projector bulb and a total of around 3 talks that actually happened at the time they were suppose to.

For anyone who didn't quite follow the Wiki definition earlier, THIS is Chaos.