Swarm User Community
The Swarm project is trying to foster an active user community in which users drive the development of Swarm.
This is a seed for that community on the WWW. At present the user community exists entirely by word of mouth and the mailing list.
Administrivia
SwarmFest Announcement - We are planning to hold a Swarm Users meeting Feb 16-17, 1997, to bring together all the people who have been part of the Swarm development and beta processes for a free-ranging, face-to-face interchange of approaches, ideas, gripes, tale-telling, and (hopefully) fun! If you intend to attend, please fill out the registration form and mail it to <address@hidden>.
User Contributions
We've added two directories on our ftp site for user contributions. Ths will be a trial implementation where there may exist two categories of contributions: 1) Evaluated contributions or those that the Swarm Hive has decided it would be useful to maintain even if the originator loses interest and 2) Unevaluated contributions or those that the Swarm Hive has not examined and, in general, won't know anything about. The former will be restricted to those contributions for which we've been given permission to distribute or modify in any way. It is predicted that these will only consist of contributions that we can fold into the SFI copyright and the LGPL. And the latter will be less restricted.
Evaluated ftp site: ftp://ftp.santafe.edu/pub/swarm/users-contrib/eval
- swarm-ga-961010.tar.gz, genetic algorithm library contributed by JJMerelo. Please read the documentation for this package.
- swarm-neuro-961106.tar.gz, neural network library contributed by JJ Merelo - At present, only the CRNNdemo works; but, this should not affect the rest of the library. Please read the documentation for this package.
- GraphLib-0.1.tar.gz, limited graph library and demo app. This was contributed by Manor Askenazi. The Demo is called "BankNet" and docs are provided in HTML and postscript and MicroSoft Word. Comments & suggestions are more than welcome. <address@hidden>
Unevaluated ftp site: ftp://ftp.santafe.edu/pub/swarm/users-contrib/anarchy
- shuffler.tar.gz, Shuffler object donated by Ted Belding. The Shuffler object takes a list pointer and a number of elements as an input and rearranges the elements of the list.
- Grid1d.tar.gz, Grid1d object donated by Ted Belding.
- Strattice.tar.gz, A 2d discrete stratified lattice. Donated by Jim Clark.
- Vision.tar.gz and VisionDemo.tar.gz, An implementation of rudimentary agent "vision" where each seeing agent carries a camera. Donated by Fabrice Chantemargue.
- 3dLib-0.1.tar.gz, A simple class that implements discrete 3 dimensional space. Donated by Glen Ropella.
- scl-0.05.tar.gz, This is Barry McMullin's implementation of an artificial chemistry designed with a view to generating simple phenomena of autopoietic organisation. (The file scl-data00.tar.gz contains the data for a soon to be released working paper 97-02-012.)
User Links
Below are some users who have WWWeb pages about their projects either presently using Swarm or intending to use Swarm. If you have such a page, e-mail us and we'll put your link in here, also. (I got these via examination of the responses to the user survey. If I missed yours please e-mail me address@hidden.)
Gecko -
Gecko is an individual-based simulator for modeling ecosystem dynamics
being developed at the Center for Computational Ecology at the Yale
Institute for Biospheric Studies. It is being developed by Ginger
Booth.
Village - Village is a model being developed to test varying anthropological theories about Anasazi Village Formation in the Verde District. It is being developed by Tim Kohler and Carla Van West. Eric Carr has parially implemented the model in Swarm. The Village4 source code is up and running with Swarm 1.0.0.
Fabrice Chantemargue is a member of a team at the University of Fribourg that has implemented a model of Implicit cooperation and Antagonism in Multi-Agent Systems in Swarm.
MIMD Systems - Jim Clark at McGill University is porting a simulation of an MIMD parallel computer via "processor agents" moving around in a data space to do load balancing on those processors. He has provided a postscript paper entitled "A Model for Natural and Artificial MIMD Systems" describing the model.
Drone - The CAR Group at the University of Michigan Program for the Study of Complex Systems has developed a tool called "Drone" that can be used with Swarm or with other simulation packages to do multiple runs of a simulation while varying the inputs automatically. The CAR Group consists of Michael Cohen, Robert Axelrod, and Rick Riolo.
BeeSim - David Sumpter at the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology is studying the behaviour of honey bees and is progressing on the simulation of such using Swarm.
SCL v0.05 - Barry
McMullin is studying artificial chemistries and the origins of
life. He has two papers available at SFI and many more accessible via
his home page. The first one,
Computational Autopoiesis: The Original Algorithm (
postscript -- 548207 bytes), is about the particular artificial
chemistry that inspired him to develop the SCL model. The second one,
SCL:
An Artificial Chemistry in Swarm (postscript
-- 205293 bytes), is about the SCL model. (The file scl-data00.tar.gz
contains the data for a soon to be released working paper 97-02-012.)
Gerard Weisbuch of Ecole
Normale Supérieure is using Swarm to study adaptive agents in
interaction with their physical or biological environments, exploiting
renewable resources such as fisheries or polluting
their environment and in interaction with other agents in
markets
Vladen Babovic and Thomas Gudmunsson from
The Danish Hydraulic Institute are
studying Individual Based Modelling of Aquatic Ecosystems
and Adaptive Numerical Grids.
J.J.
Merelo is interested in artificial life, genetic algorithms, neural
nets, and other techniques, especially applied to optimization. See the
neurolib
and
libga libs
he's contributed to Swarm.
Benedikt
Stefansson is interested in Computational Economics and is specifically
using Swarm to study the dynamics of competition in a differentiated
product market and an evolutionary model of Principal-Agent organizations.
Paul
Box of the University of Florida is using Swarm to develop a
self-organizing systems approach to modeling and simulating recreational
boat traffic in Sarasota Bay.
Claudia Pahl-Wostl's group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Duebendorf (EAWAG) is studying ecological and socio-economic networks. A current Swarm model is being used to generate ecological networks, which will allow the investigation of the effects of a network's structural organization and of the properties of the individual network elements on system performance.
Naga
Krothapalli at Florida State University is interested in the
simulation of multi-agent manufacturing systems. (Naga's
web page will
soon be active.)
John B. Corliss and László Gulyás-Zana are part of a group at the Central European University that is starting a Systems Laboratory which will study agent-based complex systems models of social systems as collections of individuals.
Carl Lipo and Sarah Sterling at the University of Washington and Emergent Media is working on the Cultural Transmission Project, which is using simulation to model social interaction using an evolutionary approach to social archeology/anthropology.
Matt
Hare at Macaulay
Land Use Research Institute (MLURI) is building a model of the
socio-economic & ecological domain of Red Grouse population dynamics
called
Weaver using Swarm. Matt is also interested in the larger issues
of the dependence of a model on implementation and how to avoid such
or ensure the integrity of a model when translated.
indicates those who have, at one time or
another expressed interest in presenting their work at SwarmFest '97.
If you'd like to do the same, send me a mail message. If I put an
by your name and you don't intend to present, then
please let me know that as well.
Page Maintenance glen e. p. ropella <address@hidden>
Last modified: Tue Jan 28, 1997