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Welcome
to evolutionary-research!
Evolutionary
biology is one of the most exciting and most fundamental areas
of research. Much of its fascination comes from the fact that
such research sheds light on origins. This is often obscured
by technical details of a particular research question and the
corresponding model. Details matter and they might even kill
a particular model. However, if the models and their meaning
can no longer be seen, most people loose interest in the debate.
This is, where this site wants to help. It shall bring together
experts and lay people to search for answers in this exciting
modern discipline. Now you may think: Ok, the experts do the
research and they present results in such a way that lay people
can understand them. Fine, but ...
..what can I contribute to evolutionary-research?
A lot more
than you may think: One of the fastest growing fields of modern
scientific research are computersimulations. This is also
true for evolutionary research. The last century has seen
an enourmous amount of analytical math revealing a lot of
interesting principles about evolution. However, in order
to handle a problem analytically (i.e., by a formula), one
usually has to assume conditions that are rarely found in
nature in order to keep things managable. This does not invalidate
the math, since valuable insight can be obtained from analyzing
a "pure" effect. Nevertheless, many times one will
want to analyze more realistic conditions. And this makes
the math often too complex for human brains.
But if - and oh, what a big if - one can describe the
elementary processes governing the ultimate fate of a system,
then this can be fed nowadays into a computer that will simulate
the system and observes its fate under the conditions specified.
Experts do have computers. They can get access to some of
the most powerful computers on earth. But the difference between
the power of supercomputers and ordinary PCs has been shrinking
all the time. Certain things can still be done only by supercomputers.
Yet an incredible amount of meaningful, interesting evolutionary
research can be done by those, who use usually use only a
tiny fraction of their potential computing power:
Your
Personal Computer!
Many problems
of interest in evolutionary research can be completely parallelized:
You download a model which is coded in a particular program
(simulator). This program gets a particular combination of
input-data that specifies properties of the model. Once it
runs, it observes a defined set of output-data that describes
the fate of the world specified by the model. Computation
of one single worldhistory is hard to parallelize in
a general way and this will therefore not be attempted in
the near future. However, many different simulations specified
by one model have to be calculated to understand the underlying
biology. Each new simulation is slightly different from the
previous one. Furthermore, a single run is not enough to get
a feeling for the results: They might be result of extremely
good or bad luck, since a lot of chance is involved in these
models. So, in oder to investigate things properly, many simulations
have to be run to calculate proper means, standarddeviations,
etc... This can easily be parallelized: One central
server keeps track of all inputs and outputs. The server
also helps experts to analyze the results.
Will
I know what I contributed to?
Yes. Unlike
many other
distributed computing projects evolutionary-research
has a lot of room for discussion. Not only for experts.
Therefore, when results have been analyzed, they will be published:
In a way appropriate for facilitating the discussion of experts
and in a way appropriate for helping non-experts to
understand what's going on. Before you even start the first
calculation, you can read about the scientific questions behind
the models that your computer simulates. And you can choose
the model thats most interesting
to you (once several simulators are available). However, you
will have to wait for the analysis of the simulations to get
a feeling for the answers of the questions.
What's
next?
We invite
you to study the site, bookmark it and compute
with us. If you want to participate, you may sign
up
to help us estimate interest and get an email when simulators
become available. Return from time to time and watch evolution
of this site. As soon as simulators for simulating evolutionary
models become available you are free to download and use them.
You may then submit your name with the results calculated
or you may submit results anonymously - that depends on whether
you want to be identifiable in the high scores. If you
like this project, you may set a link about it on your webpage
or tell your friends. If you want to write an article about
it and need information about evolutionary-research
you can not find on these pages, feel free to contact
us.
Whatever
you do: Be
part of the adventure
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