Re: [Swarm-Modelling] newbie question

[Scott Christley]

alex dinovitser wrote:

> My main question regarding SWARM, is; How suitable is it for these less
> ambitious applications where there is a small number of simple agents
> (entities) and only a few types of agents, each with a fixed set of attributes
> that get re-calculated during every interaction, with results fed to a simple
> 2D animation as the model runs???
Setting aside beliefs about how to do modeling, Swarm as a simulation 
tool is quite capable.  In a way it is almost too capable because it 
just provides APIs to handle the mechanics of running discrete-event 
simulations as well as some basic auxiliary APIs for pseudo-random 
number generation and distributions, managing lists(collections), and 
graphical display.  Everything else is left to you, but you have 
Objective-C, an object-oriented language that is a superset of C.  
Unlike, other simulation packages, it doesn't provide builtin entities 
or process that you can just pick and use.  At the same time, Swarm does 
not force a world view (I just learned these terms ;-) upon you; 
implement your simulation using a process-oriented, activity-oriented, 
or event-oriented paradigm and even feel free to mix/match these.

Whether it is suitable is more difficult to answer because it depends 
how you measure suitability.  The usability factor of Swarm is not very 
high; I think you need to be a decent programmer to be productive with 
it, and primarily you should have a good concept of object-oriented 
programming.  You use the object-oriented features of Objective-C to 
implement your agents, entities, processes, events, etc. of your model.

cheers
Scott