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<font size=3>Dear EvoGrid-news list subscribers. Welcome to this
brand-new list reporting news of the Evolution Grid - Origin of Life
Simulation project!<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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:<br>
<a href="http://www.evogrid.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.evogrid.org<br><br>
</a>2009-2010 Public Talks<br>
21 October 2009: SMARTlab<br>
18 November 2009: SETI Institute Colloquium Series, Mountain View,
CA<br>
December 2009: UC San Diego/CALIT2 (TBD)<br>
13 January 2010: Stanford Computer Systems Colloquium-EE380, Stanford
University, CA<br>
April 2010: CONTACT, NASA Ames Research Center, CA<br>
18-21 August 2010: IEEE Workshop on Games (TBD), Copenhagen, DK<br>
19-23 August 2010: Alife XII, Odense, Denmark (TBD)<br><br>
*** Details on October 21 talk ***<br><br>
###<br>
Bruce Damer on EvoGrid @ The SMARTlab, Oct 21, 6:15pm<br><br>
The EvoGrid: Simulating An Origin of Life and Providing a Technological
Pathway for the Future of Life<br>
A SMARTlab Show & Tell Seminar with Bruce Damer<br>
6:15pm, October 21, 2009<br>
Playroom, SMARTlab, University of East London (directions below)<br>
Map & Directions:
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/ye2v3l8" eudora="autourl">
http://tinyurl.com/ye2v3l8<br><br>
</a>About the Presentation:<br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
About Bruce Damer:<br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
How to find SMARTlab, University of East London<br><br>
The SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, Knowledge Dock Building<br>
University of East London, Docklands Campus<br>
4-6 University Way, London E16 2RD, UK<br>
Tel: 0208 223 7823 (Administration Office)<br>
Map & Directions:
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/ye2v3l8" eudora="autourl">
http://tinyurl.com/ye2v3l8<br><br>
</a>###<br><br>
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