NextNower Bruce Damer’s EvoGrid: Attempting to Model the Origins of Life on Earth

A few days ago, NextNower Bruce Damer’s EvoGrid “Evolution Grid” project–an attempt to model the origins of life on Earth, a kind of “Artificial Origin of Life” experiment in a large computer simulation–was featured in the New York Times in an article written by veteran science and tech reporter John Markoff.  The article includes reflections from Prof. Richard Gordon and George Dyson and two color images from the original EvoGrid movie. We hope this will raise the visibility of the project tremendously, assisting in attracting funding sources or partners to allow Bruce’s team to expand the effort in 2010 and get the central simulation and the EvoGrid@Home portions fully operational.

If you like the article, please visit this link to recommend the article so it gets a higher ranking, and to share it using social media tools:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/science/29grid.html

Explore the project further and view the YouTube animated movies: http://www.evogrid.org

Wanted: Home Computers to Join in Research on Artificial Life

Ryan Norkus/DigitalSpace

BYTES Researchers seeking signs of artificial life generated by high-performance computers want to use a network of small computers to analyze data. The project, the EvoGrid, relies on two open-source software projects, including Gromacs which simulates digital evolution.

By JOHN MARKOFF for the New York Times

Published: September 28, 2009

Having trouble discovering extraterrestrial life? Then you might consider evolving your own.

Ryan Norkus/DigitalSpace

A concept view of an artificial protocell forming in the EvoGrid.

In October, a small team of Silicon Valley researchers plans to turn software originally designed to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life to the task of looking for evidence of artificial life generated on a cluster of high-performance computers.

The effort, dubbed the EvoGrid, is the brainchild and doctoral dissertation topic of Bruce Damer, a Silicon Valley computer scientist who develops simulation software for NASA at a company, Digital Space, based in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Mr. Damer and his chief engineer, Peter Newman, are modeling their effort after the SETI@Home project, which was started by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program to make use of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers in homes and offices. The project turned these small computers into a vast supercomputer by using pattern recognition software on individual computers to sift through a vast amount of data to look for evidence of faint signals from civilizations elsewhere in the cosmos.

The EvoGrid goal is to detect evidence of self-organizing behavior in computerized simulations that have been constructed to model the first emergence of life in the physical world. Pattern recognition software on home computers would seem a perfect tool.

The project is a new effort in the field of computer-based artificial life research, which generated great interest among computer scientists and biologists in the 1980s and ’90s but waned as rapid progress was made in synthetic biology. In the past decade researchers have begun modifying genetic material for applications like drugs and the growth of fuels. Many scientists believe the field stands close to synthesizing biological life from basic materials.

Digital artificial life research is based on the original work of Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann at Los Alamos Laboratory during the 1940s. Von Neumann posed the idea of a cellular automaton, essentially an array of cells, like the squares of a checkerboard. Each cell could represent simple states like on and off, creating an ever-changing lattice that could be programmed with simple rules in a computer.

Later artificial life researchers created programs to take advantage of the growing power of computers to model evolution in simple, abstract universes. Tierra, in particular, first developed by the ecologist Thomas Ray in the early 1990s, drew a great deal of attention. The program, which ran on more than 100 workstations, demonstrated the mutation of digital forms and elementary aspects of evolution. More recently, Spore, from Will Wright, popularized many of the aspects of artificial life in a game that is now widely available on desktop computers, videogame consoles and even iPhones.

Yet despite widespread interest, the field has had difficulty escaping the critique that modeling such “toy universes” may be intellectually interesting but is unlikely to create digital forms with the incredibly complex properties of biological life.

“Every 10 years somebody revives these systems,” said George Dyson, a science historian, who worries the EvoGrid may be reinventing the wheel.

The project also has its defenders.

“My attitude is, let’s give the strong artificial life hypothesis a chance,” said Richard Gordon, a radiologist at the University of Manitoba, who has written widely on the subject and is an adviser to the project.

Answering skeptics, Mr. Damer said that by coupling far more powerful computing systems than previously available, with potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of PC-based observers, the EvoGrid could make it possible to detect emergent behavior. “The main challenge,” he said, “is not the generation of some kind of novel molecular interaction. Rather, it’s the analysis and trying to see what’s going on.”

To quickly build the EvoGrid, the researchers are relying on two open-source software projects.

Boinc is a system financed by the National Science Foundation that uses the Internet to permit scientists to take advantage of free computing cycles available on network-connected computers. Last week, for example the system was composed of more than 500,000 computers that generated an average of almost 2.45 petaflops of computing power. By contrast, in June of this year, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, built by I.B.M. at Los Alamos National Laboratories, produced 1.1 petaflops.

To simulate digital evolution, the EvoGrid will use a second program, Gromacs, developed at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, to model molecular interactions. EvoGrid researchers hope to create a computer model that replicates the early ocean and then use it as a virtual “primordial soup” to quickly evolve digital forms.

Software simulations that can model evolution could be used by human designers, Mr. Damer argued. “We can’t build cars and airplanes or even toys these days without computer modeling and simulation,” he said. “So why not biochemistry?”

Google Earth Visualizes Climate Change Scenarios for COP15

Google Earth has released this Climate Change Intro Tour, ahead of the United Nations’s climate conference in Copenhagen in December (COP15) as part of the Google Earth Outreach program. Below is the 5 minute intro video; you can view these tours on YouTube, or visit http://www.google.com/landing/cop15 to see scenarios including

Climate Projections under a High Emission Scenario

Climate Projections under a Low Emission Scenario

NextNow and Building the Second Renaissance

NextNow Collaboratory is part of the Renaissance2 Great Shift Gathering which will take place in Perpignan, France from 22nd to 26th October, including a launch of the WorldShift Alliance.

Our partner, Renaissance2, a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to catalyzing global social innovation, is inviting NextNowNetwork members to join the Great Shift Gathering by offering a 30% discount on tickets to the event. The discount code will arrive in an email to NextNow members.  Please use this discount when registering to receive 30% off the fee.

The Gathering is designed around two main events.  Event 1 is on Designing a Resilient Civilization and focuses on new models forming the basis of Capitalism 2.0 and projects that can accelerate their adoption.  Event 2 emphasizes the importance of the role of Conscious Evolution, of shifting ourselves, our organizations and our families and communities to the next level of conscious co-creative capacity and the ability to act collectively intelligent, in harmony with nature’s intelligence.

Links:

R2 website http://www.renaissance2.eu/events/index.php and the t

Registration http://greatshiftgathering.eventbrite.com .

We hope to see you in Perpignan on October 22nd !

Consensus on Standards That Matter: Global Footprint Releases 2009 Footprint Standards and Comments on Stigliz Report

Global Footprint Network, our collaborator on the Summit of Ecological Creditor Nations, has just released its 2009 Ecological Footprint Standards, building on the 2006 standards (the first set of internationally recognized footprint standards), and including more than five substantial revisions.  You can download the Ecological Footprint Standards 2009 but be advised that the report is not for a general audience, lacking extensive, introductory material on analysis or communication.  Reading the report, however, is not necessary for non-experts to get excited about the evolution of consensus not only on Footprint standards themselves but on their increasing importance to sustainability and thrivability.  Good standards matter.  We agree with Global Footprint Network on why standards are important to calculating Footprint:

A growing number of government agencies, organizations and communities are adopting the Ecological Footprint as a core indicator of sustainable resource use. As the number of Ecological Footprint practitioners around the world increases, different approaches to conducting Footprint studies could lead to fragmentation and divergence of the methodology. This would reduce the ability of the Footprint to produce consistent and comparable assessments across applications, and could generate confusion. The value of the Footprint as a trusted sustainability metric therefore depends not only on the scientific integrity of the methodology, but also on consistent and transparent presentation of results across analyses. It also depends on communicating results of analyses in a manner that does not distort or misrepresent findings. To meet these goals, Global Footprint Network initiated a consensus, committee-based process for the development of standards governing Footprint applications, and for an ongoing scientific review of the methodology. Ensuring that Footprint results are both credible and consistent will encourage even more widespread adoption of the Ecological Footprint, increasing its effectiveness as a catalyst for a sustainable future.

Consensus on emerging standards has also been an important issue in corporate social responsibility for decades.  There weren’t always organizations like Global Footprint Network or B Corp to help shine light on which standards really matter, which practices really result in the intended goals instead of, for example, simply green washing.  And building this consensus has been a slow process.  Debate about the inadequacy of Gross Domestic Product as a standard by which the wealth of countries is judged is also decades-long, although today it’s much harder to successfully argue that money spent on things like building prisons and alarm systems actually adds to a country’s wealth–but the debate on standards had to actually (and painfully slowly) penetrate to the level of a collective questioning of what wealth really is for consensus to begin to swing toward new standards.  And such a debate is meaningless unless set in the context of consensus about the physical limits of our planet’s ability to regenerate itself and to therefore sustain our quality of life.

Which is why Global Footprint Network’s response to the Stiglitz report from the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, which has focused on one challenge–how we can move beyond GDP to broader measures of a nation’s economic, social and environmental well-being–merits significant attention:

The report synthesizes the complex field of economic performance and social progress indicators and substantiates the voices of early pioneers like Hazel Henderson and Hermann Daly. With this report, there is now wide agreement that humanity’s success in the 21st century depends largely on robust navigational tools. The report has built a productive platform for further discussions. However, there is still much work to do. The report points out that there is no consensus yet as to which indicators provide the greatest value, and how they should be applied in guiding public policy.

First, it is crucial to build on the important work of the Commission – and perhaps its most significant finding is the need to track distinct policy goals separately: economic, performance, quality of life, and environmental sustainability. We agree that combining these various aspects of well-being would dilute clarity and provide numerical results with little practical utility. However, there still remain some misconceptions about the Ecological Footprint and the overall significance of ecological constraints, as reflected in the report.   Environmental sustainability is an area that we believe affects all others – from the well-being of a nation’s economy to the well-being of its people. For this reason, we believe it is important to directly address some of the issues about the Footprint raised in the report.

The Commission created by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and chaired by Nobel Prize-winning economists Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Professor Amartya Sen of Harvard, has opened a debate about human well-being in the 21st century. To succeed, we must ensure that the debate remains open, comprehensive, and relevant to emerging trends.

We’re strongly encouraging the Commission to work with the Global Footprint Network to build on this work, so critical to creating and accelerating the consensus that can lead to widespread adoption of standards that matter.

Download the Stiglitz Commission Report
Download Global Footprint Network’s Response to the Report