[Cilib-announce] CILib v0.3 released

[Edwin P. <es...@cs...>]

Hi everyone,

As promised version 0.3 of CILib was released today (long overdue). Some 
of the highlights of this release include:

* New decorator based PSO architecture.
* Copyrights have been corrected throughout.
* PSO, GCPSO, CoOperativeOptimisationAlgorithm and MultistartAlgorithm
   should be stable.
* PSO topologies are now resizeable.
* NichePSO improvements (mostly to fit into the new architecture - this
   version is still broken - read not equivalent to Riaan's original
   version yet - there are a few known bugs - watch the CVS version for
   fixes during the next week)
* LFPSO has been added - still an initial version for testing
* OptiBench simulator has been removed and will be replaced by a
   stand-alone CiClops simulator to run on the lab machines.
* Measurements now return Object to support multi-objective algorithms
   that return a collection of solutions as well as measurements for
   non-quantative/nominal types.
* New benchmark functions have been added.
* ProgressIndicator's have been dropped in favour of StoppingConditions.
* Bug fixes and code tidy up.
* The simulator in net.sourceforge.cilib.Simulator is deprecated - it
   doesn't scale well. It will be superceded by the CiClops simulator. It
   is, however, still useful for stand-alone testing. The progress
   indicator has been improved and the default number of samples reduced
   to 30.

The code is still marked as alpha in the software map and the following 
is a list of things that need to happen before we can upgrade the status 
to beta (probably by cilib v0.5)

* Investigate basing StoppingConditions on Measurements.
* NichePSO fixes and testing.
* LFPSO fixes and testing.
* NN architecture.
* Review of EC package.
* Update of documentation - long overdue
* Complete writing unit tests for all code
* Convert XMLObjectFactory to use SAX instead of DOM
* Review all TODO's in code.
* Support for CiClops back-end.
* Introduction of the BinaryPSO code.
* Introduction of the data-structures framework
* Re-factoring of common tasks into util package

You can download the latest version from http://www.sf.net/projects/cilib/

If you are currently developing on CILib remember that you should be 
using the latest CVS version on a day to day basis.