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Re: Open source? -> Need to read source to model?
From: |
Robert |
Subject: |
Re: Open source? -> Need to read source to model? |
Date: |
Tue, 18 Jan 2000 08:19:27 -0500 |
Not caring about the electronics in a car (or source code) is fine, but you are
still responsible for your electronics working properly. I was a police
officer for
several years and when I was given excuses like "but my speedometer said...,"
(and
a myriad of others...no wonder I became a modeler :-) it usually prompted me
into
the "the proper operation of your vehicle is your responsibility" lecture. In
the
same way, the modeler or scientist is responsible for code they use, even if
deeply
embedded in a package. You may choose not to browse swarm code at some level
and
trust that it was written satisfactorily for your particular needs...but you are
still responsible for the results. Who of us wants to hear an explaination of
an
error start with "but swarm was supposed to...."
The bottom line is that I also want to encourage nonprogrammers to use swarm,
but
not if it means algorithmic ignorance. Let's spare them the gory
implementation
details (this is at least where I draw my personal "trust" line with swarm).
But
let's not spare the understanding of the algorithms. With every new level of
abstraction, we get farther from understanding what our models are really
modeling.
Robert
Pietro Terna wrote:
> sure, it is a car, but in my car I don't care about electronic
> components
> and so on. Using Swarm I had to read the source code in a very few number
> of cases, mainly to cope with internal errors.
>
> I agree that it is very useful to have the source, also to improve our
> ability in the art of programming. But if we want to have more and more
> social scientists using Swarm and agent based models, we have to facilitate
> their efforts.
>
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Re: Open source? -> Need to read source to model?, David O'Sullivan, 2000/01/17
Open source? -> Need to read source to model?, James Odell, 2000/01/17