We had a nice go-around on this in the mailing list about 2
months ago. Fred Wan was looking at ways to do it, and he posted
several questions and descriptions of his experience. I believe
in the end he came around to my way of thinking.
My recommendation:
learn how to pass command line arguments to your program and run
in batch mode. Use an external program to manage the
repetitions. I have used Drone and think it is good. Because
my windows users could not get Drone to work, I created a perl
script that can do the replication and parameter sweeps (for an
arbitrary number of variables). That is here:
http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/replicator.pl
I wrote up a little tutorial for Objective-C users who want to
pass command line
arguments and may also want to watch the simultion in GUI mode.
That is here:
http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/ps909/Agent-Based_Models/simpleObserverBug3-6.tar.gz
I don't get any feedback one way or the other about this. I
take that as positive, because when things are fouled up, I get
plenty of negative feedback :)
On the Java side of the equation, I believe replicator.pl can be
adjusted and Sven Thommesen posted an excellent memo on argument
passing from the command line and you can find a link to it in
the SwarmFaq.
The alternative approaches that some have considered.
1. In the swarm tutorial, there is a simulation that repeats
itself with benefit of an experiment manager class. Look at
simpleExperBug. That one has the Swarm Gui controlling a
wrapper class that spawns simulations. You don't get Gui display
of the action going on in a simulation. I don't see much point
in this approach, as a result, and think the batch mode is
better. And if I were at a meeting about the tutorial, I'd vote
in favor of a motion to remove this component.
2. I worked pretty hard to enable Gui display in a context like
that. The last working model is this one:
http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/repeatingHeatbugsParameter-2.0.1x.tar.gz
This creates an experiment manager, and the "next" action spawns
a simulation that you can watch and interact with. There is
some monkey business (problems I am not taking time to fix) with
Swarm itself that Marcus Daniels explained. The problem causes
some crashes when you start/stop/start the individual runs of
the model. I am not digging into this more because I think the
approach I recommend above is the best.
Until our recent go-around on this, I had forgotten that Steve
Railsback had emailed me with a variant of the simpleExperBug
approach that worked in Objective-C. I remember it was a model
of fish movement in a river that had an absolutely beautiful
picture with it. I think if Steve is reading this message, he
will probably announce for us the URL of his code, as I seem to
have lost it.
I will update the FAQ with my opinions here. To the best of my
knowledge, I've given a full account of the differing points of
view.
Charlotte Bruun wrote:
>
> Dear List,
>
> Is there anything new on experiment management?. At the FAQ page there is
> an old discussion on how to repeat experiments (for example with different
> random seeds), but this is from 1998. How do users handle this problem in
> 2001?
>
> Charlotte Bruun
--
Paul E. Johnson email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science
http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045 FAX: (785) 864-5700
==================================
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.