This is Texinfo edition 2.2 of `gauntlet.texi' as of 9 September 1995. This document was initially created by Jörg Heitkötter on September 4, 1994.
Copyright (C) 1994, 1995 The WindSpiel Company. All rights reserved.
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The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a Bulletin Board System (BBS) as a potentially useful virtual apparatus designed to facilitate internetworked communication of man.
The Committee of Archaic Computation of the Serious research Fossile Institute defines a Bulletin Board System as `Something hopelessly rude, blatantly hostile, and consequently useless.' With the effect of the closedown of the Serious research Fossile Institute's BBS, on July 1, 1994.
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation defines the Committee of Archaic Computation of the Serious research Fossile Institute as `a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first to have their footnotes removed from the history book of sciences when the revolution comes,' with another footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome new FTP sites for their new ENCORE network project.
Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the Committee of Archaic Computation of the Serious research Fossile Institute as `the bunch of mindless jerks, who were the first to have their footnotes removed from the history book of sciences, when the revolution came.'
An Infinite Knowledge Generator (aka ENCORE) is a wonderful new method of propagating academic wisdom across the vast global distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without all this tedious mucking about in classrooms.
It was discovered by lucky chance, and then developed into a governable form of knowledge propulsion by a small team of nobodies that came from absolutely nowhere. (Which is precisely the location they went afterwards.)
This, briefly, is the story of its discovery.
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbable knowledge by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Ethernet Massively Imparallel Neural Computer to a hyper vector color-plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of coffee) were of course well understood--and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaniously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminancy.
Many respectable computer scientists said that they weren't going to stand for this--partly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.
Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the `infinite improbable knowledge field' needed to flip a student's mind across the mind-paralysing distances from uninitatedness (pre-PhD) to wisdom (post-doc), and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, a long time student who had been involved in a mindboggling amount of particularly unsuccessful self-defined research projects, found himself reasoning this way:
`If,' he thought to himself, `such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. `So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbable knowledge generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot coffee...and turn it on!'
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden `Infinite Knowledge Generator' out of thin air, in what was by later generations known and sung as the `sapphire of wisdom' project.
It startled him even more that just before he was about to be awarded the Serious research Fossile Institute's Price for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable female computer scientists of the Institute's Committee of Archaic Computation who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a young smartass and Bulletin Board System user from the other side of the planet...
The End?
`No surrender! The jester is dead. Long live the jester!' --- Derek William Dick, Internal Exile `Please do not be alarmed by anything you see and hear around you. You are bound to feel some initial ill effects as we have been rescued from certain death at an improbability level of two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand to one against--possibly much higher. We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-nine thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway. Thank you.' --- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Anything that happens, happens. Anything that in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. Anything that in causing itself to happen again will, while happening again, most likely reinvent itself.
It doesn't do it in chronological order, though.
'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation has, in what we laughingly call the past, called ENCORE the alternative way to spell SAFIER; this utterly insignificant point of view had a great deal to do with parallel universes and the wholly remarkable things that happen therein, usually in chronological order. Very little of all the ongoings that made SAFIER virtually dissapear overnight on April 4, 1994, will ever be known by anyone below the level of Advanced God, and since it is now well-established that all known gods came in existence in a place we falsely call the 'Land of the Free,' the gods take their freedom and keep their mouth shut. (They already had a great deal of explaining to do as to what happened to each other and are therefore not available for comment at this time...)'
So, dear fellow mortals, let's for a while forget about the gods, their smeared mascara, and showdowplays...let's get down to earth and deal with things that are already in existence...
Welcome to
___ _ _ ______ _ _ ___ (TM)
/ -_) ' \/ _/ _ \ '_/ -_)
\___|_||_\__\___/_| \___|
The Evolutionary Computation Repository Network
"WHAT DO YOU WANT TO LEARN TODAY?"
Dortmund (DE) * Santa Fe, NM (USA) * Hong Kong (HK) * Warwick (UK) *
Pasadena, CA (USA) * East Lansing, MI (USA) * Detroit, MI (USA) *
Capetown (ZA) * Berlin (DE) * Palaiseau (FR) * West Lafayette, IN (US) *
Oviedo (ES) * Curitiba (BR)
`If the evil spirit arms the tiger with claws, Brahman provides wings for the dove.' --- Buddha
-- HOWTO: $Id: encore,v 1.1 1995/09/09 15:43:22 joke Rel $
Welcome to
___ _ _ ______ _ _ ___ (TM)
/ -_) ' \/ _/ _ \ '_/ -_)
\___|_||_\__\___/_| \___|
The Evolutionary Computation Repository Network
"WHAT DO YOU WANT TO LEARN TODAY?"
Dortmund (DE) * Santa Fe, NM (USA) * Hong Kong (HK) * Warwick (UK) *
Pasadena, CA (USA) * East Lansing, MI (USA) * Detroit, MI (USA) *
Capetown (ZA) * Berlin (DE) * Palaiseau (FR) * West Lafayette, IN (US) *
Oviedo (ES) * Curitiba (BR)
* * *
ENCORE VIA FTP
This is the EClair at EUnet Deutschland GmbH
ftp://ftp.Germany.EU.net/pub/research/softcomp/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at the Santa Fe Institute
ftp://alife.santafe.edu/pub/USER-AREA/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at The Chinese University of Hong Kong
ftp://ftp.cs.cuhk.hk/pub/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at The University of Warwick, UK
ftp://ftp.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/pub/mirrors/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at The California Institute of Technology
ftp://ftp.krl.caltech.edu/pub/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at Wayne State University, Detroit
ftp://ftp.cs.wayne.edu/pub/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at The Michigan State University
ftp://ftp.egr.msu.edu/pub/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at The University of Capetown, South Africa
ftp://ftp.uct.ac.za/pub/mirrors/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at Technical University of Berlin, Germany
ftp://ftp-bionik.fb10.tu-berlin.de/pub/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France
ftp://blanche.polytechnique.fr/pub/eark/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
ftp://coast.cs.purdue.edu/pub/EC/Welcome.html
This is the EClair at The University of Oviedo, Spain
ftp://zeus.etsimo.uniovi.es/pub/EC/Welcome.html
* * *
ENCORE VIA THE WORLD-WIDE WEB
This is the Clife site at The University of Granada, Spain.
http://kal-el.ugr.es/ENCORE.html
This is the Clife site at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/coast/archive/clife/Welcome.html
This is the Clife site at The Santa Fe Institute, NM, USA.
http://alife.santafe.edu/~joke/encore/
The Clife site at EUnet Deutschland GmbH, Dortmund, Germany.
http://research.Germany.EU.net:8080/encore/
* * *
ENCORE VIA E-MAIL
ENCORE access by e-mail is currently only available via the EClair at
EUnet Deutschland. Send e-mail to our always busy Softbot Squirrel, aka
<archive-server@Germany.EU.net> with "help" in the message body for a short
description of the commands recognized by Squirrel.
As an example, we show how to get the latest copy of "The Hitch-Hiker's
Guide to Evolutionary Computation", aka the FAQ to Usenet's comp.ai.genetic;
and the "Clicky Interface to ENCORE" (Clife), that allows for click & point
navigation of your nearest ENCORE site, plus several dozen other relevant
repositories, newsgroups, and websites. (Where "relevant" means: Artificial
Intelligence, Artificial Life, Bioinformatics, Operations Research, Applied
Mathematics, Cellular Automata, Fuzzy Systems, L-Systems, Nanotechnology,
Neural Networks, and Simulated Annealing).
To: archive-server@Germany.EU.net
Subject:
--
begin
get research/softcomp/EC/FAQ/hhgtec.ps.gz
get research/softcomp/EC/etc/html/README.clive
get research/softcomp/EC/etc/html/clive.tar.gz
quit