New cladistics program

[Daniel Barker]

LVB 1.0: RECONSTRUCTING EVOLUTION USING PARSIMONY AND SIMULATED ANNEALING

This new program for reconstructing evolutionary history is now available.
LVB uses a simulated annealing search for parsimonious trees. This will
often give better results than hill climbing (steepest descent) with large
data matrices (e.g. of over 50 objects). In other words, for a given
amount of run time, LVB may find shorter trees. But LVB should not be used
with small matrices, particularly when an exhaustive or branch and bound
search is possible.

THE PROGRAM AND MANUAL ARE ENTIRELY FREE.  Currently, LVB 1.0 is
distributed as portable text files or a compressed Unix archive, to be
compiled by the user with an ANSI C compiler. Soon, a ready to run version
for the Power Macintosh will be available. This will work on its own,
without extra software.  People interested in the Power Mac version should
e-mail me or go to the LVB WWW page in a few weeks. A ready to run version
for Windows 95 will be made available if there is enough demand. Please
e-mail me expressing interest if this would be useful for you.

THE MANUAL IS NOW AVAILABLE IN ELECTRONIC FORM as a PostScript file. If
you can use this, please e-mail me requesting a copy. I will send one as
an attachment by e-mail. (The file is just over 600 K in size.) The
electronic and paper versions have the same content. Anyone who does not
want a PostScript file may order the paper version from the WWW page.

For information and to obtain LVB 1.0, see

http://www.icmb.ed.ac.uk/sokal.html


Daniel Barker,
Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology,
University of Edinburgh,
Daniel Rutherford Building,
King's Buildings,
Mayfield Road,
Edinburgh
EH9 3JR