This work was supported by the Santa Fe Institute and by grant ONR N00014-95-1-0975 from the Office of Naval Research, acting in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Additional support was provided by the University of Michigan Program for the Study of Complex Systems.
I thank Rick Riolo for his advice and encouragement; he played a major role in designing and testing Drone, and he gave me helpful feedback on several early drafts of this documentation. I also thank Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen, the other members of the CAR Group, for their support and their ideas regarding Drone's design.
I'm grateful to Terry Jones for pointing out the bug in the routine ran3 from Numerical Recipes in C [8]. Finally, Don Libes suggested using the Bourne shell when using an Expect script to execute shell commands on a remote host. I appreciate his quick and helpful response to my questions, and his Expect toolkit made Drone possible.
Drone is dedicated to the memory of Tim Stanley, whose work on running parallel genetic algorithms over networks of workstations in a hostile environment [9] inspired portions of this script.