found this note in the genetic algorithms digest, and since i've seen ga's discussed here and the implementation looks interesting i thought i'd pass it along

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Subject: New PERL EA library Hi, I would like to announce the release of (yet another) PERL evolutionary algorithm library, called OPEAL (which stands for, you guessed it, our_own PERL evolutionary algorithm library). It's at http://opeal.sourceforge.net .

The idea behind this library is to take advantage of the flexibility of PERL to create a buzzword-compliant library; so far, the library allows descriptions of components using XML; an algorithm is described by an XML document, and a program can just parse it to run the algorithm. A XSchema for the XML dialect is provided.

The library will also use SOAP (by the SOAP::Lite module) to distibute evolutionary algorithms among different processors.

So far, it has a bare-bones steady-state evolutionary algorithm, but several mutation and crossover operators for two different kind of "chromosomes" have been included. Creting new chromosomes is easy and straightforward (and documented).

Of course, any advice, collaboration, and so on is welcome. Thanks! J