Swarms and subSwarms: (was Re: Defininng and using an object as a Swarm and a SwarmObject at the sametime.

[Paul E. Johnson]

"William S. Shu" wrote:
> 
> Please help me find practical ways of expressing the following conceptual
> problem in Swarm (and adhere to Objective C requirements as well)
> exemplified by:
> 
> @interface MalariaPop:Population:SwarmObject

> @interface MalariaPop:Population:Swarm

> 
> MalariaPop is a population of malaria germs, and hence it is a kind of
> population.  Inside a person, I am interested in the malaria population as
> an object, and so I define it as a swarmObject.  But MalariaPop contains
> malaria germs, whose interactions I may also want to consider.  So I define
> MalariaPop as a Swarm!
> 
William's question caught my interest because I've wondered who has
implementations of multiple-level nested Swarms that they can share.

I think the approach to William's problem should be as follows.

Make the "highest level container" of Swarms at the model swarm level. 
So ModelSwarm is a Swarm.  The ModelSwarm does not create the micro
level objects, rather it can create new "holding companies", little
model swarms, in each of which you have these germs doing their
business.  You have each of these little model swarms self-contained, so
they have build objects methods and such. They also have schedules

You can make each of the little holding companies from a new class, and
you could consider making it a SUBCLASS of ModelSwarm.  This new
subclass, perhaps it is what you mean by population, has methods in it
that create the SwarmObjects, orchestrate their behavior, AND MOST
IMPORTANTLY, this new subclass has get and set methods that can
communicate the results of the internal processes.  This is a subclass
of ModelSwarm, so if you have written special methods in ModelSwarm you
have access to them in this subclass. 

Wouldn't that be a good way?

Who has examples?

-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700

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