Swarm Design, batch mode, repeating runs

[Paul Johnson]

I've been interested in making my simulation repeat itself several times
and I've studied the simpleExperBug and Heatbugs and also gotten some
advice from Benedikt S. about it.  I've come to some ideas about
how simulations ought to be designed from the start and wonder what 
you think.

First, if a person is going to use the simpleExperBug approach to
repeating simulations, as Alex L and others recommend, it seems one
ought to design the simulation from the start so that all parameters
are set in ObserverSwarm and then passed to ModelSwarm with set methods. 
Telling new users to do so from the start, probably in the tutorial or heatbugs
examples, would make the transition to repetition and batchmode simpler.  (That
is, there's no reason to teach people to create probemaps and such in ModelSwarm
if the are just going to have to move them into Observer later.)  Why
not save the trouble?  It is a pretty hard job of coding to take an
existing thing in the existing heatbugs style and shuffle to get into the
simpleExperbug style. NO?

Second, something really puzzles me in HeatbugsBatchSwarm.m.  I can't figure
out why the sim is written to create an EZGraph that is then dumped into
a file.  Most people, I suspect, would just have the modelSwarm print
that value directly to a file.  Why go through this strange path of creating
an EZGraph in batch mode?  Perhaps this is showing some more general strategy
and I wish you'd give me some ideas about it.


Paul E. Johnson                      address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science           http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                 Office: (913) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045               FAX: (913) 864-5700
 


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