Important Notes about EvoCA
===========================

EvoCA runs on a CA platform called CAMELot, which was developed by members
of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center working on the COLOMBO project
(sponsored by the ESPRIT-IV programme of the European Commission).
Unfortunately, CAMELot is not freely available at present, although you
may be able to get a copy if you ask nicely (but I can't make any promises -
the COLOMBO project is nothing to do with me).
For more details, look at:
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/~colombo/

CAMELot also requires that LAM is installed on your system, for running
parallel processes (even if you only intend to run it on a single machine).

The source code provided (evocab.cpt) is basically C code with
a few changes which get preprocessed by CAMELot.  You should therefore be
able to inspect the code and figure out what's going on even if you 
cannot actually compile and run it.

When EvoCA is started, it looks for a parameter file from which to read
parameter values.  This file is specified by the #defines _InitialInputDirectory
and _ParameterFile near the start of the evoca.cpt source file.  An example
parameter specification file, which shows the default values for all parameters
(lines starting with '//' in this file are treated as comments) is provided
at params_template.txt).  It should be fairly clear from the parameter names what
each one does.

A source file rungenome.cpt is also provided, which is a modified version of
evoca.cpt that will read in a saved genome from a previous evolutionary run and
show it in action.

If you *have* managed to get both CAMELot and LAM installed, you should
be able to compile and run the code.  Here's how:

How to run Evoca:

1. Start LAM with "lamboot -v lamboothosts"
   (where lamboothosts is a text file containing the names of the
   machines on which you wish to run CAMELot in parallel, listed one
   machine per line)
2. Start CAMELot with "./camelot &"
3. Load configuration (.cnf) file with File->Load configuration...
   (you will probably have to change the supplied configuration to
   suit your own system. First load the config file, then do steps
   4 and 5 below, then change the config settings via
   Configure->C compiler command line... & Configure->MPI run command...)
4. Load source (.cpt) file with File->Open...
5. Press Compile button (wait for success message)
6. Press Build button (wait for success message)
7. Press Run button to bring up Run dialog:-
 a. press Visualise to see what's happening
    (visualisation step of 1 should work fine, then select
    substate "life" to see CA states)
 b. press Loop to iterate through CA updates indefinitely
    (until Pause is pressed)
 c. press Go to iterate through a fixed number of updates then
    stop again (to change number of updates, use Setup->Set number of steps..)
8. When finished, close CAMELot and shut down LAM with "lamhalt"

Good luck!

This program is supplied "as is".  I will do my best to answer any queries,
but I cannot make any guarantees about the level of support I can provide.

Tim Taylor
Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

tim.taylor@ed.ac.uk
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/timt/

27 April 2004