http://alife9.org/quantumTut.htm or
http://www.furl.net/item.jsp?id=663664

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July 30th: I recently gave the genetics departmental seminar at Harvard
medical school. Here is the abstract:

Does the underlying physics of a living system change its properties in
a qualitative way? Could a different physics permit entirely new types
of life? The Quantum Coreworld is an abstract world inhabited by
assembly language programs; this language-an extended version of
Corewar's Redcode-permits programs to use quantum operations on quantum
bits (qubits). The aim of the Quantum Coreworld project is to engineer,
or discover, toy quantum lifeforms. The success of such organisms-at
exploiting available resources before competitors or at cooperating
with genetically identical friends-must depend on their use of quantum
operations. If this endeavor required delicate control of large quantum
systems, there would be no way to get started with current technology.
As it happens, however, interesting quantum operations can be simulated
on an ordinary digital computer.

The Quantum Coreworld gets its name from the game Corewar and the first
Corewar-like artificial world of Rasmussen, Knudsen, Feldberg, and
Hindsholm (1990). The Quantum Coreworld ecology is run 24x7 on
participating Internet servers at http://science.fiction.org. The
software, pQmars, used to run the ecology and to develop and debug new
lifeforms is available under the GPL license. This talk is intended to
be a quick tour of the biological desiderata used to design the Quantum
Coreworld, its artificial chemistry, the quantum mechanical operations
available in the chemistry, the organization of coreworlds into an
Internet accessible ecology and some experimental demonstrations that
the world "works".

For an excellent overview of work in a similar spirit, please, see:

O'Neill B (2003) Digital Evolution. Public Library of Science
1(1):11-14.  DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.0000018
http://www.furl.net/item.jsp?id=555818

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