An Introduction to GALOPPS-the "Genetic Algorithm Optimized for Portability and Parallelism" System

; and absolutely no claim is made as to the correctness, fitness or merchantability of this code or the code on which it is based, or the accuracy of the accompanying documentation, for any purposes whatsoever. While the author will be pleased to receive information regarding any bugs discovered, and may, at his option, choose to release revised versions of the code repairing such bugs, no promise or warranty is made that such bugs will be fixed. All use of this code and documentation is at the sole risk of the user. This code, like the original SGA-C, is distributed under the terms described in the accompanying file "NOWARRAN", in accordance with the guidelines of the GNU General Public License. That means that this code has absolutely NO WARRANTY implied or given, and that the author assumes no liability for any damage resulting from its use or misuse. The contents of the NOWARRAN files for both GALOPPS and the original SGA-C code are also printed for your convenience on the second page of this document. A copy of the GNU Public License is available in subdirectory docs, in file "license". This WARNING is intended to be REAL: the many features of GALOPPS means that there are many possible combinations of features which may never have been tested, or which may contain bugs which were not discovered even though they affected test runs. At each new release, bugs in former releases have been found (and corrected), and the "last" bug will probably never be found. As with any GA code, the things can appear to work while doing something quite different from what was intended. Before investing large amounts of time and/or resources in applications based on this (or, the author believes, ANY) GA code, the user should VERIFY the correctness of the operations with the features selected. The author found several significant bugs, for example, in the original SGA-C code from which this software was initiated, even though that code has been available for several years. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Mr. Wang Gang, graduate student, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, to the writing of the 'C' code for some of the modifications and extensions of this system, and thanks him for help in debugging of some of the author's code, as well, through Release 2.05 of the ESGA/IPGA system. and other faculty members of …