My PhD Work Summarised

Actually, I'm using Meta-GAs to optimise GAs. So the problem is more like trying to optimise the process of cooking, rather than optimising recipes. Is a Supernova likely to overcook the ingredients? And which planetary biosphere should we be selecting the ingredients from?

Crottled Greeps, anyone?

Yes, I was involved in Alarums & Excursions too, as this post from 2000 shows. And I have been known to commit Filk too.

And talking about Filk... the Classic You Bash the Balrog by Lee Gold. Now some 35 years old.

Or you can sing along to the tune of "British Grenadiers"...

Some die while hunting Owl-bears
Some die while hunting deer.
Some fry by flaming Balrogs,
Some simply disappear.
But of all the ways there are to die
There's one that I most fear:
The STAB STAB STAB in the small of the back
From my comrades at the rear.

I wrote that back in 1977, at university. And here I am, a third of a century later, older, but very obviously no wiser.

What can I say? The Era was that the spawned Slobovia.

Slobbovia, being a widely diversified culture, had a widely varied range of cuisines. Certain foods, however, were ubiquitous, such as the peasant staples of gravel and dirt and, of course, crottled greeps.

Nobody was sure whether greeps were cultivated, herded, hunted, fished or mined, or whether they were even greeps before crottling. Greeps when first introduced into the writing were the subject of some competitive and conflicting claims. Each player and story would correct the previous story as to whether the greep was animal, vegetable or mineral. The matter was finally settled when a biology student wrote an article about the migration of greep DNA through a variety of mediums during its life cycle, and so the various greep dishes depended on the point in the greep's life cycle at which it was harvested.

Which brings me back full circle in another way - to genetic algorithms once more.