RE: Robustness Check and "A growing body of ad-hoc analysis solutions"

[Randy Picker]

As a complete outsider to Swarm-I setup 1.3 and now wait for 2.0-and someone
who has relied on Starlogo for simulation work, I just want to make sure
that I understand the discussion. I gather that there is no easy way native
to Swarm to repeat simulations? Most of the work that I have done in
Starlogo involves running the simulation anywhere from 100s to 1000s of
times for particular parameter values to generate aggregate statistics, and
then moving on to a different chunk of the parameter space and repeating
that process. I assume most work using simulations follows that pattern.

That makes repetition fundamental. I don't know that it needs to be native,
but it needs to be easy, and Paul Johnson's last message suggests that he
found it a struggle to make drone work.

Do I have an accurate sense of the repetition situation in Swarm? Will
anything in 2.0 change this? I sit here as someone who works now in starlogo
on a macintosh and who would like to migrate to a faster environment. That
could mean a java version of starlogo from Tufts on a Unix machine, but also
might mean Swarm, which seems, from the traffic on the list, to have an
enormous learning curve, and one made even steeper without a good setup for
repetition.

Randy

Prof. Randal C. Picker
Paul and Theo Leffmann Professor
   of Commercial Law
The Law School
The University of Chicago
1111 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637

email: address@hidden
voice: 773-702-0864
fax: 773-702-0730
website: www.law.uchicago.edu/Picker/



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