Binaries and Congratulations

[Robert J. Egge]

Benedikt Stefansson speculated that there are dozens of lurkers out there,
waiting for the entry barriers (installation difficulties) to drop before
working with swarm. While I can't verify that there are dozens out there,
he certainly described my situation quite well.

I strongly suspect that swarm holds great promise for the economics
problems I'm studying. However, I expect it would take me 2 to 4 weeks to
confirm that guess. Since I'm on a tight schedule, at this moment I don't
feel that I can risk going down so lengthy a dead-end. Instead, I've opted
for the less risky path of working with GAs (I already have established
that I can implement those without too many surprises).

Nevertheless, I am extremely excited about swarm and look forward to
reading descriptions of it applications (particularly in the social
sciences) as they become available. Hopefully I'll muster the courage to
soon make the jump from bystander to participant. And when I do, I'm glad
that there will be such a supportive "hive" already in place.

In the meantime, I just wanted to add my congratulations to the swarm team
on the release of Version 1.0.0. To this lurker, it sounds like you are
doing a great job! I'm looking forward to easier-to-install versions but
completely understand, of course, if that isn't your highest priority in
these early stages.


Robert Egge
PhD Candidate
Harris School of Public Policy
University of Chicago
address@hidden