One Hand Clapping covers a lot of ground, which can make it seem like an entertaining lecture series, with amusing sketches. Some may find Kukushkin's playfulness a bit much.

Female octopuses have been caught on video launching shells at males attempting to mate with them. Scientists at the University of Sydney recorded gloomy octopuses, or Octopus tetricus, in Jervis Bay in Australia with underwater cameras. They watched them repeatedly throw marine debris using their siphon - a tube-shaped structure that can draw water in an out of its body. As they have to move their siphon to an unusual position to do this, it is assumed to be a deliberate manoeuvre. Throws were performed by both sexes, but it was female octopuses 66 per cent of the time, and sometimes occurred during mating attempts.

A fundamental advantage of Petri net models is the possibility to automatically compute useful system invariants from the syntax of the net. Classical techniques used for this are place invariants, P-components, siphons or traps. Recently, Bozga et al. have presented a novel technique for the \emph{parameterized} verification of safety properties of systems with a ring or array architecture. They show that the statement \enquote{for every instance of the parameterized Petri net, all markings satisfying the linear invariants associated to all the P-components, siphons and traps of the instance are safe} can be encoded in \acs{WS1S} and checked using tools like MONA. However, while the technique certifies that this infinite set of linear invariants extracted from P-components, siphons or traps are strong enough to prove safety, it does not return an explanation of this fact understandable by humans. We present a CEGAR loop that constructs a \emph{finite} set of \emph{parameterized} P-components, siphons or traps, whose infinitely many instances are strong enough to prove safety. For this we design parameterization procedures for different architectures.

According to Aristotle, while living things moved themselves at will, inanimate things moved according to their natures: heavy things, made of earth or water, descended, while light things, made of air or fire, ascended. Twenty years later, the French King Henri IV hired the Italian engineer Tomaso Francini to build him some waterworks for the royal palace at Saint Germain en Laye. In 1650, the German polymath Athanasius Kircher offered an early design of a hydraulic organ with automata, governed by a pinned cylinder and including a dancing skeleton. The designers of the automatic loom used automata and automatic musical instruments as their model; then Charles Babbage -- the English mathematician who designed the first mechanical computers during the 1830s, the Analytical and Difference Engines -- in turn used the automatic loom as his model.

Defecating ducks, talking busts, and mechanised Christs -- Jessica Riskin on the wonderful history of automata, machines built to mimic the processes of intelligent life. How old are the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence? Many might trace their origins to the mid-twentieth century, and the work of people such as Alan Turing, who wrote about the possibility of machine intelligence in the '40s and '50s, or the MIT engineer Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics. But these fields have prehistories -- traditions of machines that imitate living and intelligent processes -- stretching back centuries and, depending how you count, even millennia. The word "robot" made its first appearance in a 1920 play by the Czech writer Karel?apek entitled R.U.R., for Rossum's Universal Robots.