1.5 So what is Monod

“Monod” refers to different things:

• Monod is a computational approach. This approach is strongly inspired by biology and its goals have been described earlier in this chapter. In this sense, Monod is entirely described in this manual.
• Monod is an implementation of this computational approach. This implementation runs on traditional computer hardware, and can be used to run experiments. These experiments and their results presumably reflect properties of the computational approach.

  The Monod implementation is open source and contributions are most welcome.

• Monod is a project where experiments concerning the Monod computational approach are performed using the Monod implementation.

1.5.1 Disclaimers

To the descriptions of Monod above, one needs to add that Monod is in progress. Both code and documentation are in an early planning and prototyping phase. The main consequence is that the project is recruiting contributors. If you are interested in contributing in any form, please write to the maintainer quickly! See the section Contributing to Monod below for more details.

Throughout the code and documentation, the FIXME: tag indicates material that is specifically tagged for future revision — and the language accompanying it is probably going to be rather cryptic. Furthermore, to paraphrase the Securities and Exchange Commission, this documentation contains forward looking material — it describes anticipated results and not-yet-implemented aspects of the code base. Monod is principally a source of fun and surprise, done during the maintainer(s)'s free time, and should be viewed as such, with whatever grain of salt this entails in the reader's mind. It is not subsidized by either a government grant, academia or by a private company, and no peer-reviewed articles have been published about it to date. Have a little fun.