Re: Some newbie questions on swarm

[Paul Johnson]

Willi Richert wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am starting my thesis where I will study the behaviour of agents. These 
> agents shall observe each other and copy those behaviours which seem very 
> rewarding to themselves.
>
> I've read some papers (citeseer) about swarm and am excited - it has 
> advantages very teambots looked very disadvantegous to me. This hierarchical 
> structure, the idea that observers are also just agents - all this show me 
> that many brain work has been done on swarm.
>
> Nevertheless there are some questions:
> 1) (you guested the first one ;-) Is swarm really suited to my study or is 
> swarm only for simple algorithms executed by millions of agents?

If you have citations on Swarm articles, could you please forward them 
to me at address@hidden  Or you could join SDG and then enter themself 
into the database, which shows here:

http://raven.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/sdg/biblio/


SDG is a membership organization where members like me (and maybe you) 
use and improve Swarm.  If you join SDG, I create a member page for you 
here:

http://raven.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/sdg/member_pages/

and then you can enter references for things you wrote, or things for 
other people.  THe things you wrote show in your personal page.

> 2) Is swarm actively maintained?

Maintained by volunteers at the moment.  I make sure it runs on RedHat 
Linux.

> 3) Is there a Python port so that I can script it in Python?

I do not know if it was successful, but here was an effort. Search 
swarm-support archives sometime in the fall of 2002.

> 4) Is MAML the way of choice for desigining my model, or will I have in either 
> case to handcraft my simulation code?

I don't think MAML is active now.

> 5) Are there some papers available regarding my work in connection with swarm?

See above biblio.

Concerning your suse system, we do not have RPMS available for SUSE. 
But Nigel Gilbert worked pretty hard on compiling Swarm on a SUSE system 
and I think I put a note about it in the Swarm FAQ

http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/SwarmFaq/SwarmOnlineFaq.html#2.17

That was a couple of years old, but maybe it will give you a tip.


> Many thanks in advance,
> willi richert, 
> University of Paderborn,
> Germany
>
> PS:
> When I try to install it, I get:
> checking for tclsh8.3... no
> checking for tclsh8.2... no
> checking for tclsh8.1... no
> checking for tclsh8.0... no
> checking for tclsh... yes
> checking directory of tcl.h... no
> configure: error: Please specify Tcl header path using --with-tcldir or 
> --with-tclincludedir
>
> My installed rpms:
> wr:/home/wr/suse # rpm -qa | grep tcl
> postgresql-tcl-7.2.2-16
> tcl-8.4-64
> itcl-3.3-41
> wr:/home/wr/suse # rpm -i ./2/suse/noarch/spectcl-1.1-576.noarch.rpm
> wr:/home/wr/suse # rpm -qa | grep tcl
> postgresql-tcl-7.2.2-16
> tcl-8.4-64
> itcl-3.3-41
> spectcl-1.1-576
>
>
> What is missing? (question 6? ;-)



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


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