"The meeting of these guys was definitely the best bang since the big one."

--- Encyclopedia Galactica

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Jörg Heitkötter,

He volunteered as a RA in the Biomathematics Research Group from 1987 to 1989, at the former ``Max-Planck-Institute for Nutrition Physiology,'' in Dortmund (since March 1, 1993 renamed to ``MPI for Molecular Physiology''), and spent 3 years at the ``Systems Analysis Research Group,'' at the Department of Computer Science of UniDO, where he wrote a particularly unsuccesful thesis on LEARNING CLASSIFIER SYSTEMs. In 1995, after 22 semesters, he finally gave up trying to break Chris Langton's semester record, and dropped out of the academic circus. Amazingly, he's a fellow at UUNET Deutschland GmbH's Fun & Games division (in more traditional words: the R&D department), currently working on various things in parallel. You may visit his homepage for a mostly complete list at http://alife.santafe.edu/~joke/

His electronic publications range from a voluntary job as senior editor of the FAQ in Usenet's comp.ai.genetic newsgroup, entitled The Hitch- Hiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation, over many other projects he helped bootstrapping, for example Howard Gutowitz' FAQ on Cellular Automata, available on USENET via comp.theory.cell-automata ,to about a dozen of so- called ``multimediagrams'' written in HTML, the language that builds the World-Wide Web. The most useful ones being ENCORE, the EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION Repository Network that today, after several years of weekend hacking, is accessible world-wide. And the latest additions: Zooland, the definite collection of pointers to ARTIFICIAL LIFE resources on the 'net; And Webland a KISS model of the Internet at large, including ``guided tours'' across the myriads of info-bits out there.

With Adam Gaffin, a former senior newspaper reporter from Middlesex News, Boston, MA, who is now with Networks World, he edited the most read book on Internet, that was launched by a joined venture of Mitch Kapor's Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Apple Computer Library, initially called Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet it was later renamed to EFF's (Extended) Guide to the Internet: A round trip through Global Networks, Life in Cyberspace, and Everything... If you want to find it, just fire up Netscape and select About the Internet from the Directory menu...voila! (which means: there you go!)

Since a very special event, he has severe problems to take life seriously, and consequently started signing everything with ``-joke'', while developing a liquid fixation on all flavours of whiskey. He continues to write short stories, novels and works on a diary-like lyrics collection of questionable content, entitled A Pocketful of Eloquence, which recently was remaned to Heartland, and published on the web as: http://surf.de.uu.net/heartland/

He likes Mickey Rourke's movies (especially Rumblefish and Barfly), Edmund Spenser's medieval poetry, McDonald's Hamburgers, diving into the analysis of complex systems of any kind, (but prefers the long-legged ones) and the books by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Robert Sheckley, Alexei Panshin, and, you name it, Douglas Adams.

Due to circumstances he leads a life on the edge, is usually single, would love to have children, but has none (he'd know of), has no time to get married, and still doesn't live in Surrey. He is known to reject job offers that come bundled with Porsches and still doesn't own a BMW Z3 roadster, for he recently purchased a 1996 MGF.

NOTABLE WRITINGS

Nothing really worth listing here.

David Beasley,

After spending several years at sea, he went to the Department of Computing Mathematics of the University of Wales, Cardiff, where he studied ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE for a year. He then went on to write a thesis on GAs applied to Digital Signal Processing, and tried to break Joke's publications record.

Since a very special event, he has taken over writing this FAQ, and consequently started signing everything with ``The FAQmaster'' (He's had severe problems taking life seriously for some time before that, however.) He likes Woody Allen's movies, English clothing of medieval times, especially Marks and Spencer, hates McDonald's Hamburgers, but occasionally dives into the analysis of complex systems of any kind, (but prefers those with pedals and handlebars) and the books by (of course) Douglas Adams.

He is not married, has no children, and also also doesn't live in Surrey.

He now works for Deloitte and Touche Consulting Group, (which used to be a (mostly interesting) software company, Praxis ( http://www.praxis.co.uk/ )) in Bath, England.

NOTABLE WRITINGS

A number of publications related to GENETIC ALGORITHMs. The most notable ones being:

A Sequential Niche Technique for Multimodal Function Optimization, Evolutionary Computation, 1(2) pp 101-125, 1993. Available from ftp://ralph.cs.cf.ac.uk/pub/papers/GAs/seq_niche.ps

Reducing Epistasis in Combinatorial Problems by Expansive Coding, in S. Forrest (ed), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, Morgan- Kaufmann, pp 400-407, 1993. Available from ftp://ralph.cs.cf.ac.uk/pub/papers/GAs/expansive_coding.ps

An Overview of Genetic Algorithms: Part 1, Fundamentals, University Computing, 15(2) pp 58-69, 1993. Alailable from ENCORE (See Q15.3) in file: GA/papers/over93.ps.gz or from ftp://ralph.cs.cf.ac.uk/pub/papers/GAs/ga_overview1.ps

An Overview of Genetic Algorithms: Part 2, Research Topics, University Computing, 15(4) pp 170-181, 1993. Available from Encore (See Q15.3) in file: GA/papers/over93-2.ps.gz or from ftp://ralph.cs.cf.ac.uk/pub/papers/GAs/ga_overview2.ps

"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death;
out, out brief candle; life's but a walking shadow;
a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage;
and then is heared no more;
it is a tale; told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing."

--- Shakespeare, Macbeth