Assembly Theory
After seeing Hector Zenil's most recent preprint on arXiv (link), not being aware of the history behind the animosity (see blog link below), I thought it was a hit piece on the team behind Assembly Theory. Even though I do not feel comfortable with the style of the preprint, I have to say that I find the content very compelling.
The first thought I had back in October 2023 when I first read the Assembly Theory paper in Nature (Open Access: link) was that it was kind of interesting but did not warrant its title or the extreme claims by various outlets. It also sounded like a possibly useful application of algorithmic complexity to a specific domain, chemistry, where the algorithmic operations are elementary chemical operations.
And I forgot about it until that preprint.
It is worth reading the blog first. I rediscovered the idea of Universal Distribution, which is very, very cool.