GA in Municipal Water Systems

EDITORIAL Editorial I hope you had a good start in 2007. GECCO surely had. With 577 submissions, GECCO-2007 has beaten the 2005 record of 550 submissions by 4.4%. And there are still many events for which the submission is still open: the 16 workshops (the deadline is March 23rd), the late-breaking papers track (the deadline is April 28th), and the human competitive, the " Humies " , awards (the deadline is May 28th). And what about the keynote event? To have Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert and Steve Jones together is amazing. But to have the public debate in the Central Hall of the Natural History Museum, a place soaked in history and science, that's the cherry on the cake. Don't you have the impression that, as time goes by, GECCO becomes better and better? And then there were four! This issue completes the first year of SIGEVOlution, a result that one year ago seemed a mirage to me. As the previous three issues, also this fourth issue delivers you as much content as we could get: three contributed papers several sections devoted to GECCO-2007, summaries of recently discussed PhD theses, the table of contents of the forthcoming issues of ECJ, and the calendar of EC events. Many times a day we run tap water, for cooking, for drinking, for washing, etc. Tap water is something that most of us take for granted. Well, guess what? As Zheng Yi Wu explains to us in the first contributed paper, a genetic algorithm may have helped in bringing the water to our houses. Then, Juan-Julián Merelo and Carlos Cotta, in their continual exploration of our community (did you read their previous paper in SIGEVOlution?), take us inside the field of Metaheuristics. In the third contributed paper, William B. Langdon shows us how the GP bibliography, one of the most valuable resources of our community, is accessed online. The cover is a detail taken from the metaheuristics coauthorship network provided by Juan-Julián Merelo and Carlos Cotta. The whole network is available on page 8. And at the end, due thanks to the people who, with their invaluable help, made this issue possible: Tap water has been taken for granted as a daily resource for many people , but it may not be well known that genetic algorithm optimization has been playing an important role in managing and operating municipal drinking water systems by means …