RE: experiment management

[Fred Wan]

Hi,

Paul Johnson and I indeed had an extensive discussion about this. It comes
down to generality of the swarm model: swarms can be nested in other swarms,
swarms can be nested in guiswarms but guiswarms cannot be nested in other
guiswarms. The point of having guiswarms control other guiswarms and swarms
is that you (the experimenter) can choose at which level you want to monitor
the progression of your experiments and what's going on inside of your
simulation. At the lowest level you may want to see the movement of your
agents, how high their energy levels are, etc., and at the highest level you
want to see which experiment with, e.g., which agent parameterization is
running. The reason not to put all the GUI stuff into one guiswarm is that
you may want to turn off the GUI stuff at the lowest level (and run an
ordinary swarm). At a certain point the elementary movements of your agents
may not interest you anymore, but sometimes when you make changes to the
design you may want to revert to the full-blown GUI version. This would be
the reason to be able to nest one guiswarm into another, and that is not
possible. You'll have to choose at which level to have GUI facilities;
either at the highest, in which case you can see some general statistics
about the consecutive runs, or you'll have the low-level data in swarm
windows.

If you work with Objective C then you can use Paul's replicator script with
no problems. However, I didn't get it to work with javaswarm.

Fred.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden
> [mailto:address@hidden Behalf Of Charlotte Bruun
> Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 10:51 AM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: experiment management
>
>
> Thank You for the long and helpful answer, which however leaves
> me with an
> additional problem. My old batch versions using objectLoader do not work
> with newer versions of Swarm (2.1.1). Do I have to use the
> lispAppArchiver?
>
> Charlotte
>
> At 08:45 10-09-01 -0500, you wrote:
> >We had a nice go-around on this in the mailing list about 2
> >months ago. Fred Wan was looking at ways to do it, and he posted
> >several questions and descriptions of his experience.  I believe
> >in the end he came around to my way of thinking.
> >
> >My recommendation:
> >
> >learn how to pass command line arguments to your program and run
> >in batch mode.  Use an external program to manage the
> >repetitions.  I have used Drone and think it is good.  Because
> >my windows users could not get Drone to work, I created a perl
> >script that can do the replication and parameter sweeps (for an
> >arbitrary number of variables).  That is here:
> >http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/replicator.pl
> >
> >I wrote up a little tutorial for Objective-C users who want to
> >pass command line
> >arguments and may also want to watch the simultion in GUI mode.
> >That is here:
> >
> >http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/ps909/Agent-Based_Models/simpl
eObserverBug3-6.tar.gz
> >
> >I don't get any feedback one way or the other about this.  I
> >take that as positive, because when things are fouled up, I get
> >plenty of negative feedback :)
> >
> >On the Java side of the equation, I believe replicator.pl can be
> >adjusted and Sven Thommesen posted an excellent memo on argument
> >passing from the command line and you can find a link to it in
> >the SwarmFaq.
> >
> >The alternative approaches that some have considered.
> >
> >1.  In the swarm tutorial, there is a simulation that repeats
> >itself with benefit of an experiment manager class.  Look at
> >simpleExperBug.  That one has the Swarm Gui controlling a
> >wrapper class that spawns simulations. You don't get Gui display
> >of the action going on in a simulation.  I don't see much point
> >in this approach, as a result, and think the batch mode is
> >better.  And if I were at a meeting about the tutorial, I'd vote
> >in favor of a motion to remove this component.
> >
> >2.  I worked pretty hard to enable Gui display in a context like
> >that.    The last working model is this one:
> >
> >http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/repeatingHea
> tbugsParameter-2.0.1x.tar.gz
> >
> >This creates an experiment manager, and the "next" action spawns
> >a simulation that  you can watch and interact with.  There is
> >some monkey business (problems I am not taking time to fix) with
> >Swarm itself that Marcus Daniels explained. The problem causes
> >some crashes when you start/stop/start the individual runs of
> >the model.  I am not digging into this more because I think the
> >approach I recommend above is the best.
> >
> >Until our recent go-around on this, I had forgotten that Steve
> >Railsback had emailed me with a variant of the simpleExperBug
> >approach that worked in Objective-C.  I remember it was a model
> >of fish movement in a river that had an absolutely beautiful
> >picture with it.  I think if Steve is reading this message, he
> >will probably announce for us the URL of his code, as I seem to
> >have lost it.
> >
> >I will update the FAQ with my opinions here.  To the best of my
> >knowledge, I've given a full account of the differing points of
> >view.
> >
> >Charlotte Bruun wrote:
> > >
> > > Dear List,
> > >
> > > Is there anything new on experiment management?. At the FAQ
> page there is
> > > an old discussion on how to repeat experiments (for example
> with different
> > > random seeds), but this is from 1998. How do users handle
> this problem in
> > > 2001?
> > >
> > > Charlotte Bruun
> >
> >
> >
> >--
> >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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>
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