Niche Construction Model
------------------------
Written by Tim Taylor, timt@inf.ed.ac.uk
Version: 1.0 (8 February 2004)
===============================================================================

This distribution contains the following subdirectories:

src/		  Contains application source code and a makefile
include/	  Contains application header files
obj/		  Contains object files (empty until project is made)
depend/		  Contains source code dependency files (empty until project is made)
bin/		  Contains executable file (empty until project is made)

Also included in the route directory is the file niche.prj, which is an
Anjuta project file for users of Anjuta (this is an open-source integrated
development environment for Unix - see www.anjuta.org for details).

Also included in the src directory is the file params.txt, which is an
example parameter specification file.

To make the project in a Unix environment, move to the src directory and type
'gmake' (the makefile only works with gmake, not make).  This should create
an executable file 'niche' in the bin directory.

The code is written almost entirely in standard C++, so should be able
to compile on any platform.  The only change that may be required is in file
Simulator.cc, where there is code for compressing some of the output data files.
This currently works by making a system call to the 'gzip' program.  To make
this work on a platform where gzip is not available, replace all mentions of
gzip in Simulator.cc with a suitable replacement compression utility, or just
remove these sections of code.

To run the program (in a Unix environment), move to the bin directory and
type './niche'.  The program takes no command-line arguments. However, it does
expect to find the file params.txt in the current working directory, from which
it reads in parameter values. An example file is provided in the src directory.
The format should be self-explanatory (anything after a double slash '//' on
a line is treated as a comment).

This program is provided 'as is'. I believe it to be bug free. If you suspect
otherwise, please let me know.  I will attempt to answer questions about the
code and parameter setup within reason, but I cannot make any guarantees about
the level of support I can provide.

Tim Taylor
Institute of Perception, Action & Behaviour
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
timt@inf.ed.ac.uk
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/timt/ 

25 February 2004
===============================================================================