RE: record & replay of probe activity

[Rick Riolo]

Steve,
I agree there are two functions as you mention,
recording what one did and playback of a run including
all the changes via gui one did,
and that one might use one without the other.
(I'm sorry if that wasn't clear in my posting.)

I'm not totally comfortable with having the probe
do the recording directly, but maybe I can be convinced
of the errors of my thinking.
My concerns are:

1. I like to record all these changes in with the
   same file of initialization state *and* with
   the data that is produced.
   That way I can look at/save one file and have
   all I need to see what happened and/or to do the run again.
   I'm not sure that can be done cleanly if everything
   is turned over to probes.  (eg my report file
   will already be an open file, so I'd want to pass a
   FILE ptr to the probe, or an equivalent swarm 
   output file object.)

   Of course I can imagine other people will have a preference
   for some other approach, eg, having different files
   for initial state, for recording during-run changes,
   and for output data.
 
2. I like having more control over what happens
   when I set a variable.
   For the recording purposes, I like having control
   of the format.
   But having a setMyVar: method allows me to do
   other things, eg, check the value being set
   and conditionally accepting it based on
   the values of other variables.
   (Of course this can get complicated and not
   work in some cases.)
   
In short, yes, its nice to have Swarm do as much
as possible along these lines, so users don't have
to do it, where "it" is some standard common approach.

But...I still think tools like Probes can also be much
more powerful (flexible) if they provide some
judiciously placed hooks that allow users to easily
add some custom processing.

That's why I too like the idea of an setMyVar:
method being optionally provided by the user, but if
its there, having swarm use it at all the right places
(eg in VarProbes).

I don't know...maybe I am just furiously agreeing with you!

 - r

Rick Riolo                       address@hidden
Program for Study of Complex Systems (PSCS)
1061 Randall Lab     University of Michigan
Ann Arbor MI 48109-1120
http://pscs.physics.lsa.umich.edu/PEOPLE/rlr-home.html

On Thu, 29 May 1997, Steven Clark wrote:

> Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 11:16:55 -0400
> From: Steven Clark <address@hidden>
> To: "'address@hidden'" <address@hidden>
> Subject: RE: record & replay of probe activity
> 
> Rick,
> 
> To incorporate your ideas neatly into Swarm you need Swarm itself to do
> all the work.  The design you mentioned requires the object being set to
> have a setMethod that records the setting of the IV into a file.  I
> suggest that the probe itself record the activity into the file.
> 
> I agree that things would be cleaner from Swarm's point of view if we
> insisted that all probe-settable IVs had setMyVar: methods, but that
> would put a burden on the simulation programmer.  I like the idea of
> using setMyVar: if it exists, otherwise directly modifying the data of
> the object.
> 
> Back to recording and replaying probe activity, I suggest that you
> really want two related, but independent capabilities:  record and
> playback.  The record facility would capture all IV settings done via
> probes during a run, into a file.  The playback facility would read a
> file (of the same format) and schedule all the activities therein to
> take place at the appropriate times.  I can imagine situations where one
> might want to use either one without the other, or to manually (or
> programmatically) edit the file.
> 
> (I bet that with a fully functional palyback facility we could have
> written a script to generate a playback file that would get our "sc01"
> simulation into a steady state.)
> 
> I am suspicious that there were some interesting details in the playback
> that you didn't bother to mention in your posting.
> 
> Steven J. Clark       address@hidden       313-769-4396
> Center for Electronic Commerce, Industrial Technology Institute
> Box 1485, Ann Arbor, MI  48106
> 
> 
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