Re: Presenting Results

[Matt Aylward]

On Tue, 12 Oct 1999, you wrote:
> SCHREIBER,DARREN MATTHEW wrote:
> > 
> > Here's a basic question... how do we present results?
> 
> Good question!
> 
> I'll add to it: Who has experience, positive or negative, with pasting
> images from their Swarm windows into a journal article? We just changed
> our raster so it shows shades of grey instead of colors, to see if it
> would look better in print than colors converted to greyscale by the
> printer (probably not).

While writing my honours thesis, I needed to present a lot of SWARM results. To
present raster and agent population results I used GRI ( see:
http://www.phys.ocean.dal.ca/~kelley/gri/ )
I wrote several GRI scripts which processed raw SWARM raster output 
directly into figures, and population data into graphs.  I could then process
the output from my simulations into document quality output in a few seconds.
This approach meant that as I developed the model and tuned the simulation
parameters, I could reproduce my figures automically in seconds and re-run
LaTeX  on my thesis. (even updating the data presentation scripts in the
appendices).The attached postscript files were produces in this way with the
attached GRI scripts.

> The power of the animation window to transfer information and
> understanding (and to entertain and mesmerize) is very hard to give up,
> especially after you're run your sim in front of a room full of people
> and they all thought it was cool and consequently got excited about your
> work.

To create portable animations I found Yorick useful.
(see: 
ftp://ftp-icf.llnl.gov/pub/Yorick/yorick-ad.html)
Again, I wrote a script to accept raw Swarm output in running animations.
This task was embarrassingly simple, as shown by the attached yorick script and
colour pallettes.
The great thing with yorick is that is is available free for Unix/Linux,
Windows95/98/NT, Macintosh and others. Plus it is a very fast and powerful
mathematical language that is easy for C programmers.

If anyone wants more info about any of this, just ask.

Cheers,
Matt

      ==================================
--
Matt Aylward, Depts of Botany and Geography,
   The University of Western Australia
     email: address@hidden
  Linux, OS for the people by the people.
  ====May the SWARM be with you====

grids_r1_050.eps
Description: GRI output .eps

pop_plots_r1.eps
Description: GRI graphs

graph_page.gri
Description: GRI script graph

grid_page.gri
Description: GRI raster script

swmov.i
Description: yorick script

agents.gp
Description: yorick pallette