Friends and colleagues of attendees are welcome to attend Saturday's industry bash at Winchester Mystery House sponsored by Ur Studios; scheduled for fantasy, networking, and entertainment late into the night.

The event has been put together by the familiar faces of Bruce Damer, Steve Rooke, and Sue Wilcox, founders and veterans of Digital Biota. Building on the success of previous conferences, this year DB3 offers a broad range of speakers and new stimulating topics. Appropriately for it's location in Silicon Valley DB3 will look at the technical side of ALife and the worlds it inhabits. Joining the efforts of both Biota.org and OWorld groups DB3 will look at both sides of the life and environment issue.

Jan Hauser from Sun will walk attendees through the five flavors of open source, making it easier to tell the players apart. Stephen Pettifer, attending from England, will discuss the free 'ware created at the University of Manchester for developing and managing aggregations of multi-user 3D worlds. Gerald de Jong is joining us from Holland for an update on his progress with elastic geometries for ALife. His five minute presentation last year aroused enough interest to warrant a full session! Chris Cole, President of Ur Studios, will present GEL, a new open source initiative for multi-user internet 3D.

Newcomer Andrew Phelps, from the Rochester Institute of Technology, will focus on how ALife can make all the difference when it comes to making multi-user worlds more compelling. Rodney Berry of ATR reminds us once again that ALife can be heard as well as seen with his presentation about evolving musical agents. His Feeping Creatures were a big hit at the '98 ALife Conference in Los Angeles, so don't miss this chance to see his latest work.

Artist Jane Prophet and her associate Mark Hurry of Digital Workshop, both from England, will show the completed real-time, 3D, ALife world 'TechnoSphere' which was only a twinkle last year. Their next plan is to develop it into a full fledged online game. Representing the professional gaming world Ed Annunziata, Head of AndNow, makers of the ALife games 'Virtual Ocean' and 'Nooks and Crannies' will share the realities of making commercially viable ALife entities. Jeffrey Ventrella will talk about his new company, There.com, his development plans and show some of his new experimental creatures. With a background in programming games, his current work focuses on extending ALife into avatar environments.

From the truly stellar end of the ALife universe Tom Ray will examine our misconceptions about how we approach ALife and its worlds. A panel discussion immediately after his talk will work on developing a consensus about virtual world building codes. Tom will also review his latest work with Tierra. Another veteran of the Digital Biota process is Demetri Terzopoulos who will kick off the conference with his vision of VR and ALife. Professor Rudy Rucker, who presented at Biota last year and is this years host, will talk about the Web as a model of the human mind. And on the visionary track, as usual, Biota's founder Bruce Damer will look at parallels between real life and cyberlife.

Taking the ALife discourse even further is Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author of books ranging from 'The Difference Engine' to 'Islands in the Net'. His speculative prospects on the future of ALife are always deliciously twisted yet insightful. Our last speaker slot is being contested by Saul Kato of Sven Technologies, who wants to present a paper on using artificial chemistry as the basis for ALife. His rival is Dr Richard Gordon whose book on the Hierarchical Genome is being published at long last. He's been working on it since stimulating and perplexing us with his ideas at the first Digital Biota conference and we're eagerly awaiting a copy. Sue is sure it will influence her talk on the lessons ALife programmers can learn from nature.

Representatives from NASA Ames will attend DB3, proving that once again attendees are as interesting as speakers. Expect coffee and lunch breaks to be busy with demos and discussions. We have a computer lab where you can check your email, run demos, and surf around the presenters sites. Upstairs there will be a breakout room for conversation, networking, portable demos and splinter groups.

Again old friends and new converts will be joining the Biotians. We hope you will come again to re-experience the complexities of working in the exciting field of ALife development. Come share your work and be part of the international discussion that is Digital Biota.

Please let us know ASAP, if you plan on attending this years conference. Let Sue know, via e-mail, if you're planning on attending so that we can finalize our budget for all the little things that make a difference.

It all starts on November 6th at 9 a.m. Check out the website at: oworld.hitl.washington.edu or hop across from your usual favorite site: www.biota.org

We hope you will join us this year for another exciting Digital Biota Conference!