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

[Scott Christley]

On Nov 15, 2006, at 12:22 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:

> 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.

Another viewpoint is that we know the behavior of the collective for  
this is what we can observe, so we want to know what individual  
behaviors can give rise to that collective action.  This isn't so  
obviously characterized as a simulation task, more one of model  
selection, but if viewed from the meta-level of a set of  
parameterized models (versus a single model with a set of parameters)  
then simulation becomes an exploration of meta-models of individual  
behaviors.  This is even more intractable which just gives even more  
reason to run on big computers!  :-)

cheers
Scott