Re: [Swarm-Support] development priorities (was Re: Membership in Swarm Developmen Group)

[Marcus G. Daniels]

glen e. p. ropella wrote:

> What would not be easy to do in any of the current tools is to analyze
> the structure on the fly and make future scheduling decisions based on
> those graph properties.  None of the tools _support_ that sort of
> reasoning. 
It seems to me there's a question of whether one wants to create ever 
more complex individual behaviors, or understand collections of simpler 
ones.   Is it the dynamics of a system that are interesting or 
elaborating the particular personalities in it?   Typically we come at 
ABM with the idea we know what an agent does but not what agents do 
collectively.   The point of simulating in the first place is that the 
analytics on the collection are not tractable. 

So yes simulation is computationally expensive, and thus the appeal of a 
$700 machine that is ten times faster than a PC (a Cell-based 
Playstation 3).   It happens that the organization I work for is 
deploying a Cell-based petaflop computer, so as you might imagine I'm 
biased by that!

I don't disagree that a reflective scheduler for both for simulation and 
analysis could be useful, but let's face it: Few people aggressively use 
the scheduling machinery that exists.  In some sense what you propose 
seems more appropriate for a game programming setting.

Marcus