Using distributed computer processing to work out primordial life

Interesting article from Space.com on using distributed computing (like SETI@home and Einstein@home) applied to biology. The idea is to simulate the conditions and constituents of Earth's early oceans and see if you can get simple cells evolving from pre-biotic material.

The headline is entirely wrong, though: there's no toy model of the "universe" being simulated, but rather a toy model of an ocean. But to the writer's credit, the head of the project did use just that phrase, himself.

It's a really interesting project. As the designer notes, though, chemical reactions run faster than the computers can simulate them at the moment. So the simulation would run more slowly than a real-lab experiment. On the other hand, you've got the ability to control details in a way that you don't in a lab, and some day, the processors will be much faster.