RE: [Swarm-Support] Heatbug code question

[Paul Box]

The best way to answer the question is that it's probably the way that the 
modeler visulazed the world working.  It's less an argument of what's the 
"best" way to model, and more of an explicit description of how that modeler 
views the world.  The "best" way to model usually does not come from a single 
person coding, but from lots of discussion and lots of different ways of 
representing the system in question.

One popular definition of agent-based modeling it that it's an exercise in 
applied anthropomorphism.  When you model a bug you have to be thinking about 
how that bug sees the world, and when you model a heatspace (or a landscape, 
or a parcel, or anything else) you end up thinking about the world from a 
heatspace or landscape's point of view.  In this case, the author saw the 
heatspace as the thing that reports information in cells according to the 
local area, rather than the bug searching for that information.

So, look at heatbugs (or any other program) as an opinion of how that system 
should be modeled.

>===== Original Message From Swarm Support <address@hidden> =====
>Hi there,
>   This question relates to the logic of the Heatbug code, specifically why a 
method is
>implemented where it is.  If that sounds like you, read on!
>   I'm putting together a simulation of braided rivers where water objects 
(originally
>called drops until I realised that that name was special...) flow over a 
river bed and find
>their way by moving in the direction of the steepest slope.  I've been paying 
attention to
>how Heatbug implements bug movement and wonder why it is that the actual 
method
>that looks at the eight cell neighbourhood around a particular cell 
(findExtremeType) is
>implemented in HeatSpace.m rather than in Heatbug.m. The Heatbug then 
determines
>which cell it will move to, but HeatSpace does the work of figuring out which 
cell would
>be the best to move to.  This is part of the process of getting my head 
around Objective
>C.  Any thoughts?  Thanks -
>Crile
>
>Dr Crile Doscher
>Natural Resources Engineering
>Lincoln University
>New Zealand
>_______________________________________________
>Support mailing list
>address@hidden
>http://www.swarm.org/mailman/listinfo/support

////////////////////////////////////////
// Paul Box
//         formerly of
// Aquatic, Watershed, and Earth Resources
// Utah State University