Re: Repeating Simulations: Drone or what?

[Jan Kreft]

Hi Paul,

On Wed, 26 Aug 1998, Paul Johnson wrote:

> 
> I'm just for the past few months very interested in making simulations
> repeat and I was excited to learn there is this thing called DRONE
> discussed in Sven's and Rick's recent notes.
> 
> I know it is possible to rewrite a batchswarm to make simulations repeat
> themselves (simpleExerBug) and a perl script can do it.  Drone is new to me, 
> or
> if I knew I had forgotten...
> 
> Here's what I wonder. In the swarm community, how are most people replicating
> experiments?  Are there other approaches I've never heard of?
> 
> Should replication be part of swarm itself? At Swarmfest, Roger described
> the possibility of writing swarm to allow a "reset", so simulations could be
> restarted without quitting.  It seems a small step from that to a repetition.
> 
> It just seems to me that the ability to repeat an exeriment ought not be 
> an "optional added extra" in the simulation package design. Rather, it
> ought to be integral to it.

Gecko does several runs per experiment. You specifiy the number of runs,
say 20, in the protocol file that is read in at the beginning of an
experiment (execution of Gecko). The important point is that the random
number generator is not reset. You want to repeat runs to gather
statistics of variation, right? So, you want to repeat a run with
everything the same apart from the random numbers. Or, you want to have
evolution. So, you want to start with a variation of the original
parameter set and continue with the sequence of random numbers. In either
case, it's not the same as a reset. It's a partial reset. 

Best wishes and thanks for the rpm work,

Jan.

Dr. Jan-Ulrich Kreft                    Phone +44 1222 874000 ext. 6036
School of Pure and Applied Biology      Fax   +44 1222 874305
Cardiff University                      E-mail address@hidden
PO Box 915, Cardiff CF1 3TL, UK



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