Re: interactivity & other general questions

[Rick Riolo]

I'll leave the answers to #2 and #3 to others,
but as for #1:

In short, that's not a swarm limitation, just
a limitation of that demo.

That particular demo, heatbugs, is set up so that most
parameters only have an effect if you change them before
you start the model, e.g, numberOfBugs, worldSize, etc.
That makes the program simpler (as suits an introductory demo).
For example, suppose you wanted to be able to change
the number of bugs "mid run"--- then there would have to be
codes to decide which bugs to remove, and remove them,
if the new number is < existing number.

You could (and people have) written programs
that allow you to change things like that "mid run".

And you could (and people have) written programs that allow
you to push a button to "restart" the current run,
either exactly or with newly generated initial conditions.

- r

ps But note there is one thing you have to do to be sure the
   changes you enter in those dialogs take effect,
  even when you set values at the start of a run:
   you have to press the Return key after entering
  the new value.  At least under the objectiveC version,
  the frame around the value briefly flashes red
  when the new value is processed.

Rick Riolo                           address@hidden
Center for Study of Complex Systems (CSCS)
4477 Randall Lab
University of Michigan         Ann Arbor MI 48109-1120
Phone: 734 763 3323                  Fax: 734 763 9267
http://www.pscs.umich.edu/PEOPLE/rlr-home.html

On Sat, 9 Dec 2000, Vickie M Backus wrote:

> Date: Sat, 9 Dec 2000 07:20:48 -0700 (MST)
> From: Vickie M Backus <address@hidden>
> Reply-To: address@hidden
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: interactivity & other general questions
>
> i've just started seriously looking into using swarm for biological
> modelling and have a few questions i'm hoping maybe someone could take the
> time to answer.
>
> 1) i've downloaded and intalled the jheatbugs application. it was my
> understanding that swarm was designed to be interactive, but when i change
> the number of bugs (or other parameters) in the HeabtbugModelSwarm dialog
> window nothing changes. i have to quit the simulation and start over every
> time i want to change something. do i have to do something special to get
> the changes to take affect? if i'm not missing anything and you have to
> keep restarting the program, is this an artifact of the jheatbugs program
> itself and can true user interactivity be easily coded into the swarm
> program.
>
> 2) i'm curious to know why Swarm was not entirely converted over to java.
> i understand about issues of speed, but even relatively inexpensive
> computers today can have lots of RAM and very fast (or multiple)
> processors, so speed alone doesn't seem to be a big factor.
>
> 3)mozilla and DOM: i'm a GIS user and the idea of easy integration of
> Swarm with ArcInfo is very appealing to me. when is the next release of
> swarm anticipated and will it provide easy integration with ArcInfo? i'm
> not really familar with mozilla, so maybe i'm asking silly questions, but
> here are a couple of more. i would like to write my model in java, will i
> have to convert my model to something different if i want to use the next
> release of swarm? and will the integration with ArcInfo be straight
> forward, or will some kind of interface need to be built?
>
> thanks - vickie
>
>
>
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   Swarm-Support is for discussion of the technical details of the day
   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
   [un]subscribing), please send a message to <address@hidden>
   with "help" in the body of the message.