GALib v0.0: A GNU Genetic Algorithm Library

Copyleft (C) 2000 Erik Sandberg

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

This is a library that implements a special kind of Genetic Algorithms, which
are useful in certain kinds of applications, such as the simulation of
intelligent entities. In order to make the algorithm work properly, you need
to create a number of different scalar impressions from the entity's
environment, and as output you will receive some weights of the entity's
priorities, also scalar. Some priorities can be used to choose which
survival strategy to use (by letting each priority scalar work as a weight of
the probability to choose a certain strategy), other priorities can be used
internally by the strategies.

You must also be able to tell the lib a quality number for each entity,
showing how good it turns out to work. and when there's time for a generation
change (during which some entities die and are replaced by new entities)

The entities created by this lib will get high quality numbers, so you must
be sure you are using the right way of estimating quality (if there is any
cheap trick to get unfairly high quality numbers, GALib will probably
blindly find & use that).

There is not yet any useful documentation on how to use the lib.

The library is from the beginning written for the bot system in EDGE
<http://edge.sourceforge.net/>, and it might not work perfectly on its own.
However, it has the structure of a standalone lib, so it should not be very
hard to remove the EDGE references (we have our own interface to the libc
functions, that's all).

The library is distributed under the GNU GPL, which roughly means that it
only may be used by GNU applications (with a few exceptions, such as certain
other kinds of free software, see the license for details).

The official homepage of GALib is right now http://edge.sourceforge.net/
but it might move to its own sourceforge project if it gets big enough.
If you are interested in helping developing GALib, you may do this as much
as you want, as long as it still remains GPLed. However, I would appreciate
if you told me first (email erik.sandberg@euroseek.net): If there is a public
interest for a standalone GALib, I am willing to work for that, and the only
way for me to know about public GALib interest is through feedback from the
public (i.e. you).

