RE: My personal criticism

[Larry E. Whitman]

Greeeting!

I would like to contribute to this topic.

I have observed the swarm list for over a year now and we have tried twice 
to get swarm up and running.

My experiences below.

We tried on an HP to no avail, tried on a DEC Alpha and got it partially 
working. Didn't mess with it for over six months. Decided we wanted to get 
serious and tried to install it on a linux box. Had some problems, posted a 
message to this list and within <1 hour had two suggestions on what to try. 
Tried one and it worked.

Summary:

We are right now trying to use three different "agent-based" tools (swarm 
and two others).
We have not successfully installed and used any of them initially.
For all of them we have asked questions to the "support" areas (maillists, 
etc.) and swarm is the only one that responded (and mighty quickly I might 
add).

I admit that we are really PC user types and do not understand all the 
libraries etc. (a support person here did the actual install, not us) and I 
wish that it was like a "typical" PC install, but I guess I believe this is 
unrealistic.

So, I appreciate the makers of swarm and the user community and their help.

In truth, we still have not used it to the extent to really submit a truly 
experienced opinion, but we are MUCH closer with it than anything else.

Just my two cents,

Larry Whitman              817-272-5947  fax 817-272-5952
http://arriwww.uta.edu/eif/index.html  address@hidden
Automation & Robotics Research Institute  (ARRI)
The University of Texas at Arlington
7300 Jack Newell Blvd. S.
Fort Worth, TX 76118


On Friday, March 06, 1998 7:36 PM, Martin Hinsch 
[SMTP:address@hidden wrote:
> Hi everybody
>
> These are my personal experiences with installing SWARM:
>
> We tried to install it on two different machines, a PC with
> Linux and a Sparc station with solaris. On the Linux machine
> we tried to use the Linux binary distribution and failed.
> After several frustrating hours I downloaded the sources and
> had no further problems.
> Then we went on to the sparc. On this station there was nearly
> no standard software installed (due to a recent system crash), so
> we had to build it from the scratch up. As long as it was for tcl/tk
> and objctcl everything worked perfectly. The first problem was to
> persuade blt to use the locally installed tcl/tk 7.5/4.1 instead of
> the systemwide versions 8.0/.. After having done this we went on to
> xpm. This happened to be really difficult. After having run imake to
> configure the makefiles, we tried to compile it with gcc which didn`t
> work. The README recommended to use the native compiler of the machine
> which wasn`t available. After some really ugly makefile-hacking the
> solution appeared to be to use gcc but compile a static rather than a
> shared library.
> Well, nonetheless SWARM now runs without problems on both machines.
>
> Now some criticism (which is absolutely my personal opinion
> and in several points certainly a matter of taste):
>
> - Why is it necessary to use this whole bunch of different libraries
> which are not even especially fast or easy to use?
> Wouldn`t it make sense to use for example gtk instead of tcl/tk? It`s
> pretty
> fast and already has an objective c interface. And it`s ONE library
> instead
> of four.
>
> - Concerning the design of SWARM:
> Although it`s easy to build useful simulations in a short time using
> swarm, the design of the "programmer`s interface" to me seems to lack
> a central idea. I think it looks somehow patchy.
> Also in my opinion the whole thing is far to monolithic. As a programmer
> I would prefer a design where you have several seperate parts from which
> you
> can choose which ones to use in your program (isn't that one of the
> clues of
> object oriented programming?). It should be much more modularized.
> There are certainly projects which use all the powerful mechanisms swarm
> offers, but often I think it would be useful to have a lean, fast
> framework
> wich just offers basic functionality.
>
> - In my opinion swarm is to slow.
> I really like Objective C, it's very simple and very well designed.
> But on the other hand it is quite slow. As long as you are doing simu-
> lations with hundreds of agents there is no problem but when you are
> getting
> to thousands or tens of thousands of agents (which I think is a
> reasonable
> number if you for example want to simulate evolutionary dynamics of real
> animal populations) every method call makes a difference.
> So, why not use C++ or (as there, as far as I can see it, already is
> some
> really non-standard hacking included) even design an own specially
> suited
> OO approach.
>
>
> Well that`s it for now. Maybe some of you consider my thoughts useful.
>
> Greetings
> Martin Hinsch
>
>
>                   ==================================
>    Swarm-Support is for discussion of the technical details of the day
>    to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
>    [un]subscribing), please send a message to <address@hidden>
>    with "help" in the body of the message.
>                   ==================================


                  ==================================
   Swarm-Support is for discussion of the technical details of the day
   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
   [un]subscribing), please send a message to <address@hidden>
   with "help" in the body of the message.
                  ==================================