Last update: 08 Nov 01

Frequently Asked Questions...

What's this page all about? "The biggest bang since the big one." - Encyclopedia Galactica, p.42927/sec*pl-Ag

How do you look like?

What's the game of your name? Jörg Heitkötter * Joerg Heitkoetter * JOerg heitKoEtter * JOKE * easy, eh?

Webster's Definition for "joke"

Cross references: 1. jest

1. joke \'j o-k\ n [L jocus; akin to OHG gehan to san, Skt y a-cati he implore]s 1a: something said or done to provoke laughter; esp : a brief oral narrative with a climatic humorous twist 1b1: the humorous or ridiculous element in something 1b2: RAILLERY, KIDDING { can't take a ~} 1c: PRACTICAL JOKE 1d: LAUGHINGSTOCK 2a: something lacking substance, genuineness, or quality 2b: something presenting no difficulty

2. joke \'jo- -kin-le-\ vi : to make jokes : JEST 1: to make the object of a joke : KID 2: to get by joking - jok. ing.ly av

Your current address? UUNET Deutschland GmbH Emil-Figge-Str. 80 D-44227 Dortmund, GERMANY Vox humana: +49 (0231) 972-1038 Fax machina: +49 (0231) 972-1288 E-mail: joke@de.uu.net

External affiliations?

i. Scientific The Sante Fe Institute for the Study in the Science of Complexity (SFI) The Alife Online, ENCORE and Zooland Projects. E-mail: joke@santafe.edu

Alife.Org hosted at The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) The Alife Online, ENCORE and Zooland Projects. E-mail: joke@alife.org

The Wayne State University, Computer Science Department The Genetic Algorithms Group. E-mail: joke@cs.wayne.edu

The University of Dortmund, Computer Science Department (UniDO/FBI) The Systems Analysis Group & CASA, Center for Applied Systems Analysis at ICD, Informatik Centrum Dortmund. E-mail: joke@LS11.Informatik.Uni-Dortmund.de

EvoNet initiative of the European Community at The University of Granada, Spain. E-mail: joke@www.granada.research.ec.org

Fellowships? How come you know? Ok; ...with many thanks to Malou Kagan, I've been granted a Junior Fellowship for '95 at: The Foresight Institute, PO Box 61058, Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA. E-mail: foresight@cup.portal.com Since January 1996, I'm a senior research fellow at UUNET Deutschland GmbH.

Advisories? From time to time, students ask me to serve as an external advisor of their thesis. I usually do. (Since I'm much too curious to say "no"...and the subject doesn't matter at all!) These days the first thesis was also published as a book:

• Online Publizieren im Internet von Jens Bleuel, Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany.

Reviews? Well-I have the questionable honor to provide expertise for publishers, and reviewed the following books (categories: Internet and programming languages) that meanwhile have been translated to German by Addison-Wesley Germany, and sell "quite good"...

• Internet kurz und fündig, Wolfgang Sander-Beuermann & Scott Yanoff, Addison Wesley 1995. (2nd edition out now! July'96)

• Tcl and the Tk Toolkit John Ousterhout, Addison Wesley 1995. (Published: 12/94)

• Programmieren in Oberon Martin Reiser, Niklaus Wirth, Addison Wesley 1994. (Published: 12/94)

• Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker William Cheswick & Steven Bellovin, Addison Wesley 1995. (Published: 1/96)

• How to Set Up and maintain a World Wide Web Site: The Guide for Information Providers, Lincoln Stein, Addison Wesley 1995. (not published)

• Das Python-Buch: Referenz der objektorientierten Skriptsprache für GUIs und Netzwerke Martin von Löwis of Menar und Nils Fischbeck, Addison Wesley Longman 1997. (Published: 1/97)

Naturally, I review papers too. Here's my favourite:

• `Sorting in TeX's Mouth' by Bernd Raichle, published in EuroTeX 1994 proceedings. (Bernd shows how to do Quicksort in TeX, faster, than previous implementations.)

Hmm, so what's your profession? "Hacker. Poet. Clown." (In exactly that order.)

Current Projects...?

i. Personal Electronic Books

• EFF's (Extended) Guide to the Internet with Adam Gaffin
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling
• The Farce of Physics by Bryan G. Wallace
• The New Devil's Dictionary edited by Jörg Heitkötter, based on the original by Ambrose Bierce (expect it in 4th quarter 2002)

ii. Research

• A Generic Classifier System Exploration Tool (JAZZ-C)
• The Evolutionary Computation Repository network (ENCORE)
• The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation (ENCORE)
• The Artificial Life Resource (Zooland)
• Fleuds, friendly EUnet daemons (Fleuds!)

• Spaceships in Conway's Game of LIFE by David I. Bell

• Anything related to the three Ks: Chaos, Kids, and Computation (Yep, I'll check my spelling; later...)

Vita? "Honestly, who cares? But if you really want to know...read the backpage of any of my publications."

Relevant Publications...?

i. Research

• The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation (HHGTEC)
• The Electronic Appendix to the Hitch-Hiker's Guide (ENCORE)
• The Navigator's Guide to ENCORE
• An Evolutionary Approach to Combinatorial Optimization Problems published in: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Computer Science Conf., Phoenix, AZ, 1994.
• The Zero/One Multiple Knapsack Problem and Genetic Algorithms published in: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium of Applied Computation, Phoenix, AZ, 1994.

ii. Funderstanding

There's a new series of papers coming up next, that deal with subtle peculiarities of Evolutionary Computation, i.e., those things all beginners in the field stumble over in their first experiences discovering a new science.

It is called Musings on Evolutionary Computation and the series' subtitle is Expeditions into beer-mat science, for a good reason. Hope this gives you a cue that this series is based on decent fun, rather than teaching dry scientific lessons.

The first three papers in the series include:

• Jörg Heitkötter, "Zen in the Art of Evolutionary Computation", Musings on Evolutionary Computation, 1996.
• Jörg Heitkötter, "Mutational recombinatorics", Musings on Evolutionary Computation, 1997.
• Paul Field and Jörg Heitkötter, "Pogo-sticking in the Himalayas", Musings on Evolutionary Computation, 1997.

iii. Pamphlets (sorry...)

• The Jester's Gauntlet (a journey from SAFIER to ENCORE and back)
• On the Color of Red (for the Newtonians out there)
• Hitchhiking from CP/M to ProDOS to MacOS to SunOS and Back (1996)
• Artificial Intelligence and Horse Racing (1996)

iv. Lyrics

• Heartland A diary of pain...

• Bookland Digibooks unlimited!
• Surfland The Beginner's page for UUNET Surfers
• Webland More fun ways to surf the 'net than you ever wanted to know
• Whatz Hackin'?
• Zooland The Artificial Life Resource

• Wahwah-8 (1981)
• Ein ganz normales Wochenende? (1982)
• Alarm! Als PCs noch Homecomputer hießen (1982)
• Eliots Geschenk Eine Science Fiction Parodie (1983)
• Ein Fall für Chicago Eine Super-Thriller-Kriminal Parodie (1984)
• GAMBIT - Ein Shakespearsches Psychogramm über drei Personen und einen Porsche (1995)
• Der kleine Prinz und der Goldfisch (1997)
• Puke und die Zaubermaus (1997)

• Weirdo - Mr Joke's wundersam chaotisch-melancholische Reisen ans Ende des Verstandes (1996)
• Ragnarök - Über die Liebe, das Leben und den ganzen Rest (1997)

Relevant Software...?

i. Research

• An implementation of the Hodge-Podge Cellular Automata (HODGE-C)
• A Simple GA in Pascal (SGA-P)
• A Simple GA in Fortran-77 (SGA-F)
• A Simple Classifier Systems in C (SCS-C)
• An ANSIfied version of Riolo's CFS-C package (CFS-C)
• A Selfreplicating Sharfile (self)
• A Generic Classifier System Exploration Tool (JAZZ-C)

• An (Objective-)C(++) to LaTeX converter collection (C++2LaTeX)
• A Java/JavaScript to LaTeX converter collection (Java2LaTeX)
• A Modula2/Pascal to LaTeX converter (Modula2LaTeX)
• The Delphi Bibstyle Collection (See also: The LaTeX Companion by Goosens, Mittelbach and Samarin, p418. Addison-Wesley, 1994.)

• A directory tree displayer (dtree 2.1)
• A generic binary to C converter (b2c 2.0)
• JOY - A HTML compiler (joy 0.01)
• spid - A GNU wget based hyperlink checker (spider 1.0)
• Gnewt! - A tool for creating GNU autoconfigurable tools (gnewt 0.03)
• I Ging - The chinese book of changes (iging 1.0)

Any fancy pictures...?

i. Research

• The Hodge-Podge machine in action (2-D)
• The Hodge-Podge machine in action (3-D)

• The Jabberwockey from Through the Looking-glass

What's your .signature? Different. Most times it's:

Have fun,       -joke

Jörg Heitkötter
UUNET Deutschland GmbH
Manager Research, Advanced Technologies & Security

Research & Development           UUNET Deutschland GmbH
Tel. +49 231 972 1038            Emil-Figge-Strasse 80
Fax. +49 231 972 1288            D-44227 Dortmund, GERMANY
mailto:joerg@de.uu.net           http://www.uunet.de/

It used to be:

--
Have fun,       -joke
                                   
===== ______  __         __    ==  Jörg Heitkötter
==== / __/ / / /__  ___ / /_  ===  EUnet Deutschland GmbH
=== / _// /_/ / _ \/ -_) __/ ====  Emil-Figge-Str. 80, D-44227 Dortmund
== /___/\____/_//_/\__/\__/ =====  Tel/Fax +49-231-972 -1038/-1188

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
        --Aristotle

On other occasions it's:

--
Have fun,       -joke
   __   __        __
  / /  / /  ___ _/ /_ ___ ____   Jörg Heitkötter & David Beasley  (Eds.) 
 / _ \/ _ \/ _ `/ __// -_) __/        The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to
/_//_/_//_/\_, /\__/ \__/\__/          EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION
          /___/                   http://alife.santafe.edu/~joke/encore

--
Have fun,-joke
             _              _
 ______  ___| |__ _ _ _  __| |              Welcome to Zooland!
|_ / _ \/ _ \ / _` | ' \/ _` |        "THE ARTIFICAL LIFE RESOURCE"
/__\___/\___/_\__,_|_||_\__,_|          http://zooland.alife.org

"What's the color of a Chameleon put onto a mirror?" --Stewart Brand

--
Have fun,-joke
    _              _
 __| |___   ___ __(_)  __ _ _ _  _ _  ___ _  _ _ _  __ ___  Das
/ _` / -_)_(_-</ _| |_/ _` | ' \| ' \/ _ \ || | ' \/ _/ -_) Moderatoren
\__,_\___(_)__/\__|_(_)__,_|_||_|_||_\___/\_,_|_||_\__\___| Team

What's your current favourite? "I finally found my mistress, no more current chickas nessary."

What's your Magnum Opus? "On the Hermeneutics of Contexts - Towards a Philosophy of Methaphorical Thinking."

What's your favourite Zen Koan? "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought." -Basho

What is a Koan? "One of the most misunderstood aspects of Zen by Westerners. It's neither a puzzle, nor a paradox designed to shock the mind. Instead it is an integral part of a system honed over centuries to help bring a student to direct realization of the ultimate reality." [Usually without reading the manual page first. -Ed.] - commented excerpt from "The Little Zen Companion" by David Schiller, Workman, 1994.

What is your Zen status? "Zen has no business with thinking about any status."

Why is your English so quirky? "Easy. Most of my English was picked up from the Internet, which is a pond of all variations of pidgin English. The other parts were assimilated from reading medieval English poetry, like Spenser, Shakespeare and the like. Victorian English is in style and grammar fascinatingly close to the written German language. I therefore do not speak or write perfect English, but unique English, only."

Ok, final question: Why, the hell are you doing all this? "Why not? It's lots of fun."

Thank yous? "The author would like to thank his (various) teachers for their (various levels of) patience, during his (various) unfinished educations at various universities, research institutes, and life in general. And the dear reader in particular."

...Questions Asked Frequently