Re: just posted coloredheatbugs-1.3.1

[Pietro Terna]

        Dear Paul,

        a comment about the debate on the hardness of Swarm for non programmers
and the necessity of justifying the Swarm approach by showing its high
level of responsiveness to the individual users.

        Your way, i.e. that of showing with good examples (as your interesting
heatbugs improvement) the capability of Swarm in terms of flexibility and
customizability is surely important, mainly to induce simulation users in
studying object oriented programming.

        But I think that to diffuse Swarm as a common platform for agent based
simulation - and this diffusion is probably crucial to allow social
scientists to interchange their results - the Swarm community has to
develop also other strategies.

        My idea is the following: to encourage the development of "container 
apps"
that a final user could easily adapt to her necessity, in this case with no
or very poor customizability. But if she does the first step, then we have
another new Swarm user ...

        I'm working to buid a container, so any comment is welcome.

        Yours, Pietro

At 10.07 09/12/98 -0600, you wrote:
>A while back I mentioned I had fiddled heatbugs so the bugs are
>colorcoded by their ideal temperature.  There is now a copy at
>http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/coloredheatbugs-1.3.1.tar.gz
>
>If you set the minimum ideal bug temp to 150 this sim looks really
>interesting!
>
>Don't let your browser mangle this by viewing it.  I've done what I
>could to force the server to leave gz files alone, but you have to do
>your part  (Netscape users: Right click, save link as...).
>
>If you have other interesting fiddles on heatbugs, I would be glad to
>know. I am collecting these for teaching and other documentation
>purposes to show the power and customizability of Swarm.  On the Simsoc
>mail list, there is now a debate going about modeling toolkits and the
>argument against Swarm seems to be that it is hard for non programmers
>to use.  It seems to me there is some truth in that, but in response I'd
>like to justify the Swarm approach by showing its high level of
>responsiveness to the individual user's research question.  Hence, any
>fiddles on heatbugs would be nice!  Please include a comment in the
>README to say what you have done!
>
>In case you wonder what other kinds of things might interest me, off the
>top of my head, here are some examples of things I've not yet coded.
>
>1. I wonder how the heatbug sim would run if we gave some of them a
>better vision of the field, for example.  Let some of them search in a
>larger neighborhood, for example.  Do those bugs end up happier?
>
>2.  What if there are exogenouse bursts of heat in a small section of
>the space, or little air conditioning units.  Can a small environmental
>change like that have effects that ripple all the way across the
>heatspace, possibly changing stable bug patterns or migration.
>
>-- 
>Paul E. Johnson                       email: 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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