re: graphic captures

[Rick Riolo]

Being able to save graphs would be useful.

I think it raises some big questions about what
formats to save things in, and what tools might be
useful "back ends" for swarm.
That is, it seems to me that it would be good to
not to re-invent wheels, but instead to take advantage
of things already out there, e.g., as Swarm is already doing
with tck/tk/blt.  

So along those lines, perhaps data dumps should
be made in some format that can easily be read into
some backend tools  (eg mathematica) that can do lots of different things
with the data, including movies, analysis of various kinds,
combining data from different graph or graphics dumps, and so on.

I realize that raises some thorny questions like
"well, why mathematica, why not xxx" where you can
substitute a bunch of things for xxx.
I don't have a good answer for that.
Maybe the data should be dumped in some standard
format and then people can write and circulate 
programs/scripts/etc to import from that format to
this or that general purpose program.

This may also raise questions about how to handle
and store all the data that might be generated.
Well....buy stock in disk makers I guess!

- 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