Release Notes for Pikaia 1.2

It describes the new operators and strategies included in PIKAIA 1.2, their coding implementation, and the new control variable settings that allows these new options to be used. Chapter 2 is my attempt to convince current PIKAIA users that switching to PIKAIA 1.2 is worth the (small) effort.

It is a performance study of various algorithmic versions of PIKAIA, tested again a suite of maximization problems I have been developing and using over the years whenever I experimented with new strategies and operators. The third and final chapter discusses three topics that I thought could be of interest to some current or potential PIKAIA users out there, although they have nothing really to do with PIKAIA 1.2 specifically: combinatorial optimization with PIKAIA; a parallel implementation of PIKAIA; and PIKAIA in computing languages other than plain old dumb tough FORTRAN-77.