[EvoGrid-news] London talk Wed 21 Oct & future presentations

[Bruce Damer]

Dear EvoGrid-news list subscribers. Welcome to this brand-new list 
reporting news of the Evolution Grid - Origin of Life Simulation project!

The first news item is to report that yours truly Bruce Damer will be 
giving a talk on the EvoGrid at the SMARTlab, University of East 
London/Docklands Campus this Wednesday October the 21st starting at 
6pm. An image and PDF of the brochure is attached. Also find details below.

The speaking schedule for the EvoGrid project in 2009 and 2010 is 
also listed below (subject to change). For these talks and all other 
project updates see our constantly updating web site at:
http://www.evogrid.org

2009-2010 Public Talks
21 October 2009: SMARTlab
18 November 2009: SETI Institute Colloquium Series, Mountain View, CA
December 2009: UC San Diego/CALIT2 (TBD)
13 January 2010: Stanford Computer Systems Colloquium-EE380, Stanford 
University, CA
April 2010:  CONTACT, NASA Ames Research Center, CA
18-21 August 2010: IEEE Workshop on Games (TBD), Copenhagen, DK
19-23 August 2010: Alife XII, Odense, Denmark (TBD)

*** Details on October 21 talk ***

###
Bruce Damer on EvoGrid @ The SMARTlab, Oct 21, 6:15pm

The EvoGrid: Simulating An Origin of Life and Providing a 
Technological Pathway for the Future of Life
A SMARTlab Show & Tell Seminar with Bruce Damer
6:15pm, October 21, 2009
Playroom, SMARTlab, University of East London (directions below)
Map & Directions: http://tinyurl.com/ye2v3l8

About the Presentation:
The EvoGrid is a worldwide, cross-disciplinary effort to create an 
abstract, yet plausible simulation of the chemical origins of life on 
Earth. One could think of this as an artificial origin of life 
experiment. The strategy is to employ a large number of computers in 
a grid to simulate a digital primordial soup along with a distributed 
set of computers acting as observers looking into that grid. These 
observers, modeled after the very successful @Home scientific 
computation projects, will be looking for signs of emergent 
complexity and reporting back to the central grid.

The EvoGrid will be staring very early along the path of emergence in 
a phase one might call "prevolution" in that the fundamental 
mechanisms supporting symbolic codings for replication (and evolution 
through Darwinian Natural Selection) must in fact emerge from a 
tabula rasa (ie: no engineer coded in a genetic system). The goal is 
to set up conditions to enable observers to witness the emergence of 
structures in space (rings, catalysts, containers/vesicles, simple 
repeating strings) or reaction sequences in time (autocatalytic sets 
for example) within the EvoGrid simulation. With this as a foundation 
a ratcheting up of complexity may then occur, hopefully through 
several plateaux.

Years in the future, the observing of entities which code their own 
constructions and reproduction using an artificial genome would be a 
major scientific breakthrough for emergence science and hopefully 
shed light on the possible chemical origins of life on Earth. The 
intellectual and computational breakthroughs will come through 
optimizing the pathway for vectors of ever higher self organization 
across the valleys of events of extremely low probability. In the 
distant future, EvoGrids may provide a pathway for evolution of new 
forms of life that could prove crucial for the survival of humanity 
on Earth and for life to be projected beyond, into space. In the 
shorter term, EvoGrids tuned to model the whole inner life of a cell 
in real time may lead to cures for cancer and even ways to end aging.

About Bruce Damer:
Bruce Damer is the founder of Biota.org and the principal 
investigator of the EvoGrid project. He was instrumental in 
developing early user interfaces for personal computers working with 
Elixir and Xerox in the 1980s, was an early pioneer and organizer of 
the first virtual worlds featuring users as avatars in the 1990s, and 
since 2000 has led projects for NASA to model space missions in 3D at 
his company DigitalSpace.

Bruce started research on artificial life in the mid 1980s and over 
the past decade organized the Digital Biota conference series. The 
EvoGrid combines his 25 years of research, international networking 
and patient waiting for adequate computing power. Bruce's work is 
being undertaken as PhD research through the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute.

How to find SMARTlab, University of East London

The SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, Knowledge Dock Building
University of East London, Docklands Campus
4-6 University Way, London E16 2RD, UK
Tel: 0208 223 7823 (Administration Office)
Map & Directions: http://tinyurl.com/ye2v3l8

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