    INTRODUCTION TO THE EXAMPLES

    The following sections how the software can be used on several toy
    problems.  These examples are meant to illustrate the features of the
    software.  You should note that the models and Markov chain methods
    used are not necessarily appropriate for other problems.  To gain a
    full understanding of the various possibilities, and their advantages
    and disadvantages, you will need to read both the pertinent references
    (see Facilities.doc), and the detailed documentation on the various
    commands.

    The output shown for these examples was obtained by running the
    software on our machine, with ">" at the start of a line indicating a
    command line that was input.  It is possible (even likely) that your
    results will differ, even if you have installed the software
    correctly, since small differences in floating point arithmetic can be
    magnified into large differences in the course of the simulation.
    However, unless one of the simulations became stuck in an isolated
    local mode, the final predictions you obtain (eg, from 'net-pred' or
    'gp-pred'), and the final distributions of model parameters, should be
    close to those reported below.

    Some of the examples show the output of "xxx-plt" commands being piped
    into a program called "plot".  Any plot program could be used that
    reads pairs of numbers from standard input and plots them (in some
    cases, a blank line is present to indicate the start of a new
    sub-plot).  I use the "xgraph" program written by David Harrison,
    which can be obtained from my web page.  If you don't have a plot
    program that can be used in this convenient fashion, you can redirect
    the output to a file (eg, "net-plt t l log >file") and then read this
    file into whatever plotting program you have.  As a last resort, you
    can also just look at the numbers in the file yourself.

    All the data sets mentioned here are present in directories with names
    beginning with "ex", along with the C source of the programs that
    generated the data.  The commands given assume that you are in the
    directory containing the data.  The command sequences used for each
    example are also stored in these directories, in shell files with the
    names like 'rcmds.net', 'rcmds.gp', 'bcmds.net', 'bcmds.gp', etc.
    Some of these directories also contain other command files used for
    examples in my papers.

    Computation times are given for many of the examples.  These are all
    for the current version of the software, run on the system described
    in Ex-system.doc, except for the examples in Ex-dist-g.doc and
    Ex-dist-f.doc, which I've left with times for an older version of the
    software, run on a 550 MHz Pentium III.