Demonstrate evolutionary innovation, win $20,000

The InnoCentive website is a kind of ideas marketplace where "Seekers" pose detailed descriptions of theoretical or technical problems in their field and offer financial incentives for "Solvers" to figure them out.

One of this week's challenges would be of interest to all the theoretical and experimental evolutionary biologists out there, especially given the $20,000 reward money on offer:

During the evolution of life on Earth new biological features have emerged in a process that continues without reaching an obvious maximum level of organized complexity, even now. The Seeker is interested to know if this apparently open-ended evolutionary innovation would be possible in a quarantined system. If so, can it be demonstrated? The goal of this theoretical challenge is to come up with an acceptable demonstration design to provide a positive result.

The Challenge – Design the best way to achieve a demonstration of open-ended evolutionary innovation (OEEI) in a quarantined system (QS) whose outcome can be judged without dispute. The demonstration may be proposed to take place in a biological culture, a computer model, or any medium that can do the job.

You'll need to register as a Solver to read the details of the challenge (which requires agreeing to not disclose the information therein). The Seeker has also set up a Google Groups page to discuss the issue, where someone has already suggested that this process was well-demonstrated a fortnight ago by Richard Lenski's group.

Of course, it all depends on your definition of "innovation" - and I hope I'm not crossing any legal boundaries by saying that the Seeker's definition in the detailed challenge is far from satisfying.


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