evolution@home was a
volunteer computing
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop ...
project for
evolutionary biology
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes such as natural selection, common descent, and speciation that produced the diversity of life on Earth. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biolo ...
, launched in 2001.
The aim of evolution@home is to improve understanding of
evolutionary processes. This is achieved by simulating
individual-based models. The Simulator005 module of evolution@home was designed to better predict the behaviour of
Muller's ratchet
In evolutionary genetics, Muller's ratchet (named after Hermann Joseph Muller, by analogy with a ratchet effect) is a process which, in the absence of recombination (especially in an asexual population), results in an accumulation of irreversibl ...
.
The project was operated semi-automatically; participants had to manually download tasks from the webpage and submit results by email using this method of operation. yoyo@home used a BOINC
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced rhymes with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing (a type of distributed computing). Developed originally to support SETI@home, it became the ...
wrapper to completely automate this project by automatically distributing tasks and collecting their results. Therefore, the BOINC version was a complete volunteer computing
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop ...
project. yoyo@home has declared its involvement in this project finished.
See also
*Artificial life
Artificial life (ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline ...
*Digital organism
A digital organism is a self-replicating computer program that mutates and evolves. Digital organisms are used as a tool to study the dynamics of Darwinian evolution, and to test or verify specific hypotheses or mathematical models of evolutio ...
*Evolutionary computation
Evolutionary computation from computer science is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution, and the subfield of artificial intelligence and soft computing studying these algorithms. In technical terms ...
*Folding@home
Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project aimed to help scientists develop new therapeutics for a variety of diseases by the means of simulating protein dynamics. This includes the process of protein folding and the movements ...
*List of volunteer computing projects
This is a comprehensive list of volunteer computing projects, which are a type of distributed computing where volunteers donate computing time to specific causes. The donated computing power comes from idle CPUs and GPUs in personal computers, vide ...
References
{{BOINC projects
Science in society
Free science software
Volunteer computing projects
Digital organisms
Bioinformatics