EVENTS For information on JPL tours and the speakers bureau, visit our PUBLIC SERVICES site. The Solar System Ambassador Program sponsors events in communities around the country. Find out how to become a volunteer Solar System Ambassador.		Topic - Biology, Physics, and Computer Science Artificial Life: Life NOT As We Know It Presented by Dr. Chris Adami JPL Principal Scientist, JPL Quantum Computing Technologies Group If you wish to view a tape of this show please contact Sherri Rowe-Lopez at (818) 354-6170. Thursday, February 19 The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL 4800 Oak Grove Drive Pasadena, CA For directions, click here. Friday, February 20 The Vosloh Forum at Pasadena City College 1570 East Colorado Blvd. Pasadena, CA For directions, click here. Both lectures begin at 7 p.m. PST and run for approximately an hour. Admission is free. Seating is limited. For more information, call (818) 354-0112. Within the last ten years, remarkable developments have led to the emergence of an artificial life form that lives within desktop and laptop computers. There, it reproduces and competes for available resources, and it evolves and adapts to its environment. This form of life is not biochemical, but rather computational in nature, in the sense that it uses slices of computer time to reproduce its computer code (the genome). We can think of these "creatures" as computer viruses that have been tamed, quarantined, and raised for experimental purposes. In the past, digital life forms have been useful for the study of fundamental aspects of the evolutionary process. Recently, they have caught our interest because they represent an alien form of life, one not related to terrestrial forms. Thus, they can be used to study the universality of life-detection protocols, or biomarkers in general. If this form of life can be detected, we can be hopeful that current scientific methods are not unduly biased in favor of life that we already know. To learn more about quantum computing click here.