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ECJ, A Java-based Evolutionary Computation Research System. ECJ is a research EC system written in Java. It was designed to be highly flexible, with nearly all classes (and all of their settings) dynamically determined at runtime by a user-provided parameter file. All structures in the system are arranged to be easily modifiable. Even so, the system was designed with an eye toward efficiency. ECJ is developed at George Mason University's ECLab Evolutionary Computation Laboratory. The software has nothing to do with its initials' namesake, Evolutionary Computation Journal. ECJ's sister project is MASON, a multi-agent simulation system which dovetails with ECJ nicely.

The newest version!

Before you do anything else, please read the file "LICENSE",
located in this directory. It contains the software license
you are bound to if you wish to use this software.

Additionally, please see the following important files:

docs/index.html         ECJ documentation.  Start here.
docs/manual/manual.pdf	The ECJ Owner's Manual.  A large
			reference work describing ECJ in
			detail.  Go through the tutorials
			before bothering with this one. 
LICENSE			ECJ's license
CHANGES			Change log.  Very important!
Makefile		Useful if you're running under UNIX

ECJ has two modules which rely on external libraies
which you can download as JAR files from the ECJ website
(here:  http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/libraries.zip ).
None of the libraries are required, but if you don't install
them you need to tweak ECJ a bit in order to get it to compile:

- The GUI system relies in part on the JFreeChart and iText
  libraries.  If you do not install these, you cannot compile
  the GUI at all.  You can completely delete the GUI code if
  you like (it's entirely contained within ec/display/ ) or
  if you're using Makefile, just do "make" rather than
  "make gui".

- The distributed evaluation and island model code relies on
  compressed socket options for more efficiency, and Java's
  standard libraries are broken, so they require the JZlib
  library.  If you do not install JZlib library, the code
  will still compile but you will need to turn compression
  *off* in order to run distributed evaluation or island
  models.

TO COMPILE: under UNIX, just type:

  make gui       (if you have JFreeChart and iText installed)

or

  make           (otherwise)

You can build a JAR file out of ECJ, if you like, with

  make jar

WHERE TO ASK QUESTIONS: if you're really stuck, try the
ECJ-INTEREST mailing list.  (see "Mailing Lists" at
http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/ )

Thanks,
Sean Luke
ECLab, Department of Computer Science
George Mason University

ECJ:	http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/
ECLab:	http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/