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

[glen e. p. ropella]

Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> Optimization is well-covered by packages like R
> (http://www.r-project.org).

That's not necessarily true.  Optimization of particular solutions and
particular problems are well-covered by R and/or other packages.  But, I
haven't seen any tools that help optimize ABMs.  The amount of work to
do what Scott describes inside R is huge.

Besides, I wasn't talking about optimization but the more general
search, evolution, and selection.

In any case, even if R or some other package were perfect for model
evaluation (which is not true) it would be useful to the users to
provide some integration glue to make it easier to do in practice.
Integrating the current Swarm with other packages is very cumbersome,
where integrating R with a network protocol enabled tool (like those
written in Java) only requires an understanding of how to set up those
other packages to work over, say, http.

> Better, I think, to make a simulator (or
> whatever a next generation ABM tool is thought to be), embeddable in a
> clean way in popular analytical packages.   One part of that is avoiding
> gruesomely-slow I/O of large time series files, etc.

I agree that an embeddable simulator would be a good thing.  And perhaps
that's the direction the SDG should take... I don't know.  But, I do
know that it's not feasible to embed the current Swarm codebase.  Hence
such a requirement would, again, argue against wasting more money adding
new features or targets (like the Cell) to the current code.

-- 
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is
always a vice. -- Thomas Paine