Re: getting input from human-agents via swarm/tkObjc

[Rick Riolo]

Hi Chris,
Thanks for the pointer to the NeXT manual, I'll check it 
out and see what it looks like.  (I actually am lucky
enough to own a hardcopy of that manual...well, lucky if you
are an old dog like me who still likes paper-in-hand sometimes...)

However, I'm still interested in any approaches,
including specialized hacks, that I could get going without a lot
of work in the next few weeks.
(The short term goal being just to put up a little demo
to show how one can mix humans into the agent population,
in part to make the demo more engaging.)

Thanks.
 - r

Rick Riolo                       address@hidden
Program for Study of Complex Systems (PSCS)
1061 Randall Lab     University of Michigan
Ann Arbor MI 48109-1120
http://pscs.physics.lsa.umich.edu/PEOPLE/rlr-home.html

On Mon, 18 Nov 1996 address@hidden wrote:

> Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 05:58:29 -0700
> From: address@hidden
> To: address@hidden, address@hidden
> Subject: Re: getting input from human-agents via swarm/tkObjc
> 
> Hi Rick!
> 
> >  What I'd like to be able to do is have some of
> > these agents choices be input by users sitting at
> > different displays, so they can interact in the world
> > with the other computer run agents, but not see
> > what the other humans are doing.
> 
> This is a specific use of a more general capability that we 
> obviously want to have in swarm: the ability to create
> swarms on multiple processors over a network that communicate
> with one another. 
> 
>  We have had quite a number of discussions on how to 
> do this, but have not had the time to delve into 
> implementing any of them yet. 
> 
>   The general consensus is to incorporate the "Distributed
> Objects" and "Remote Messaging" capabilities described in
> Next's excellent manual on objective-c. To get an idea
> of what this is all about, you should take a look at
> those sections in their online manual at:
> 
> http://www.next.com/Pubs/Documents/OPENSTEP/ObjectiveC/Objctoc.htm
> 
> When we finally get to the parallel version of Swarm, we will 
> probably be implementing it something along these general lines.
> 
> Another possibility is to embed the functionality of a distributed
> message passing scheme like MPI.
> 
>   If y'all want to take a stab at it, or if anybody else wants
> to, let's try to coordinate our thinking and design goals. Clearly,
> this relates to the capability to invoke multiple versions of
> the same model, ala Drone, but *within* Swarm, as we have been
> trying to get to for some time with "Experiment" swarms, which will
> manage multiple, independent, invocations of the same model.
> Distributed swarms would be more interactive with each other, and
> could be different from one another as well.
> 
> Anyway, check out the sections of the Objective-C manual referred
> to above and post your reactions..
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> Chris Langton
> 
> 
> 
>