-- $Id: README,v 8.148 2003/05/28 11:51:21 joke Rel $

	What is Zooland?
        (with apologies to CGL)

        by Jörg Heitkötter

Zooland is a scientific study of alife - in priciple, anyway. In practice,
Zooland is the currently best, since most complete, collection of Alife
resources accessible via the Internet. [It should simply give you the
sensation that someone had just found the light switch... -Ed.] 

Although all of the current resources have been created by carbon-based life
forms, there is nothing in its charter that restricts Zooland to include
resources created by non-carbon-based life forms; it is simply that this is
the only kind of life form that has, as of yet, been unable to send in URLs to
their objects of study. [Oh boy; I guess we'd better delete this paragraph.
-Ed.] 

By extending the horizons of emperical research in Alife beyond the territory
currently circumscribed by the zoo-as-we-know-it methaphora, the study of
Artificial Life in the context of Zooland, gives us access to the notion of
zoo-as-it-could-be, and it is within this mindblowingly larger domain that we
must ground general repositories of Alife resources and in which we will
discover yet another practical and useful application of internetworked
hypermedia engineering endeavors. [Jeez... what the hell are you trying to
say? -Ed.] 

In Summary, [Good! -Ed.] Zooland is a HTML/World-Wide Web frontend to the
Alife collection on EUnet Deutschland's FTP server; Alife Online at The Santa
Fe Institute plus some other tremendously fascinating places on the 'net;
accessible via the unique interface to all the sites below. [Ah, a
zoo-as-it-should-be! -Ed.].

Enjoy! 


Zooland USA: 
     http://alife.santafe.edu/~joke/zooland/ (SFI) 

Zooland Europe: 
     http://surf.de.uu.net/zooland/ 

Zooland download:
     http://surf.de.uu.net/zooland/download/


	CREDITS

Please, send your additions, comments, and complaints on dangling pointers to
joke@de.uu.net (the zookeeper). And don't take anything in this service
too seriously; it's only science.

Thanks to C. Titus Brown for the Alife FAQ; Howard Gutowitz for the
opportunity to work with him on the CA FAQ; (and the opportunity to give an
"evening lecture on assigning octal numbers to files on unixoid file systems"
;-) Chris Langton for keeping me alive at Alife Online; Nelson Minar for
patiently handling my requests; Hendrik Tiemann for our joint paper; and
everybody else I forgot to mention! (Apologies to Chris Langton & Douglas
Adams for combining excerpts of their intellectual output with mine...)

Zooland is referenced in the following book(s):

Edward J. Renehan, Jr., SCIENCE ON THE WEB - A Connoisseur's Guide
  To Over 500 Of The Best, Most Useful, And Most Fun Science Websites,
  Springer Science, New York, NY, 1996.


Have fun,	-joke

Jörg Heitkötter
(Senior Zookeeper)
             _              _
 ______  ___| |__ _ _ _  __| |              Welcome to Zooland!
|_ / _ \/ _ \ / _` | ' \/ _` |        "THE ARTIFICAL LIFE RESOURCE"
/__\___/\___/_\__,_|_||_\__,_|    http://alife.santafe.edu/~joke/zooland/

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