IlliGAL Blogging

Picked up on biota.org from ruminator's ilk, which led me to Darwin at Home which has a list of advisors. Here is the project mission statement:

It is our hypothesis that compute space is now or soon will be sufficiently rich and complex to support a reasonable "lifelike" simulation of the processes and products of evolution.

The Darwin@Home project is a challenge to multiple, independent teams to construct platforms in software, hardware or a combination, to test this hypothesis. In recent years, several platforms have been built that suggest that this goal is attainable. We believe that by pooling efforts and creating a shared community of interest, we will quicken the journey along the path of innovation.

The project has been picked up in NewScientist.com and eventually the project would like to offer a prize similar to the X prize:

A long term goal of Biota.org has been to create an international prize competition called the AlivePrize. Darwin@Home is a first step along that road by encouraging the community of people developing platforms and providing them resources and intellectual contributions. In a couple of years after the Darwin@Home efforts have matured, we will pursue the goal of financing and managing a competitive prize modeled after the Ansari X-Prize and the DARPA Grand Challenge.

I wonder whether this sort of thing is helpful to the field or merely shameless self-promotion and grandstanding. But perhaps some of you are wondering the same thing about this blog.