SMARTlab SHOW & TELL, Oct '09 - The EvoGrid: Simulating An Origin of Life and Providing a Technological Pathway for the Future of Life, with Bruce Damer

Professor Lizbeth Goodman (Director of SMARTlab)

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.