Discussion and prospect

So far, EO as a C++ class library has been released and is freely available from the URL http://geneura.ugr.es/~jmerelo/EO.html. Several thousand copies have been downloaded so far, and it has been featured in the C++ users journal website (http://www.cuj.com) and LinuxStart (http://www.linuxstart.com). EO has been used and applied to several problems, for instance, neural net evolution and evolution of MasterMind solutions. This latter application is freely available with the EO class library, and besides, can be played at http://geneura.ugr.es/~jmerelo/GenMM. The EO class library is an instance of the EO framework, which aims at evolving objects of any shape and representation, using diversity-generation and diversity-decreasing operators. In the future, there are many possible lines of EO development:

• Development of several instances of EO. Only the C++ class library is available, but there are other popular (or not so popular) object-oriented languages which could implement EO: Objective C, Java and Python, for instance, to name the three most widely used.
• Integration within object frameworks, such as CORBA or COM. Language-independent interfaces should be declared, so that EO objects can be used from any application and/or any class. Once done that, they could be integrated as part of the operating systems or environments that use them, like GNOME (which uses CORBA) or Win95/NT (which uses COM).
• Development of distributed and parallel versions of EO, using frameworks such as MPI (http://www.mpi.org) or Jini (available from http://www.jini.org ), which would allow the evolution of objects across a network.