What's my job? Tutorial info enclosed! Lets advertise. Re: [Swarmfest2005] review

[Paul Johnson]

I think I missed a meeting or something.  I thought I was getting these 
emails to the Organizers list by mistake, and just ignoring them.  If I 
am an organizer, please tell me what you want me to do, I'll do it.

Looking at the Swarmfest list, I think conspicuous by their absence are 
some long time Italian Swarm users, such as Alessandro Perrone.  How 
about Professor Luna?  Where is that friendly Mateo person I met in 
Seattle?  Does anybody know Rosaria Conte?  What is she up to?

I'm crazy enough to think that we should put some strong arm tactics on 
people to try to see if they will show up.  If you make a tentative list 
of papers within a few days, I will package it into an email to the 
swarm-support and simsoc lists saying "hey, you should come to this 
meeting."  I suppose I could do that more easily if I were not an actual 
member of your Organizing committee.

It appears to me you should quickly to act to accept the proposals you 
have in order to make sure people actually come to the meeting.  But, 
then again,that's a non-organizer's point of view.  Concerning the 
particulars, I'd be delighted in particular to hear the presentations by 
G. Ferraris as well as Freeman's talk on farming.


I'll have an outline of the tutorial session within a couple of days, in 
case you want to circulate that.  Here's what I have so far. I'm pasting 
it in out of an Open Office document I was just tying.

 I.Power Tour of Swarm Applications (1 hour)
  A. Consider an agent-based simulation.  What are the defining 
characteristics?
   i.What do the agents do?
   ii. How do they interact (sense & effect each other)?
    a) Do they “find each other” as individuals?
    b) Do they respond to “environmental traces”?
   iii. What is the Scheduling framework?
    a) Do all agents act simultaneously?
    b) Do they take “steps” in turn?
    c) Dynamic, event-driven scheduling
    d) Synchronous vs Asynchronous is a conceptual, not a Swarm, 
distinction
  B.Survey and graphical demonstration:
   i.Conway's Game of Life
   ii. Schelling's Neighborhood Segregation Model
   iii. Savage's Arborgames
   iv. Santa Fe Artificial Stock Market
   v. Latane & Nowak's Social Impact Model
   vi. Heatbugs
   vii. Mousetrap
   viii. Huckfeldt & Johnson Opinion Formation Model
 II. How to get started (45 minutes)
  A. Installing Swarm
  B. What Programming background is required
  C. What every Swarm programmer needs these things
   i.The Apple Obj-C book
   ii. Swarm docs & user guide & Swarm FAQ
   iii. swarmapps & the tutorial
 III.Swarm Idioms
  A. Memory “zones”
  B. createBegin/createEnd
  C. Protocols (id <Activity>) versus (id) and (Activity *)
  D. This will continue along with basic concepts I think are important.
 IV.Anatomy of a Swarm Program: Swarm Sugar Scape (sss)
  A. This will not be massively different from the outline I have 
online already at 
http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Presentations/ESA-Portland-2004/Presentations/SSS_Swarm_Tutorial1.pdf
 V.Adding a New Class in a Swarm Model: A Predator on the Sugar Scape
 A. The Handouts that go with this are online here:
http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Presentations/ESA-Portland-2004/Handouts/sss-2.2-Handouts.tar.gz

Advertising Message to Swarm Tutorial Students:

It is not possible for you to learn all nuances and details of Swarm in 
a single afternoon.  You can, however, gain a solid understanding of the 
kinds of problems for which Swarm programs have proven useful and some 
ideas about how you might apply these models in your own research.

I think the best way to prepare for the tutorial is to find a computer 
that has Swarm-2.2 installed, or install it for yourself, and then try 
to download the swarmapps-objc package of demonstration programs.  In 
particular, inside that package, there is a step-by-step tutorial for 
Swarm.  If you read through the README files in those directories, and 
perhaps try to compile and run some of the examples, I think it will 
give you a good frame of mind for the tutorial.

If you can't get access to a computer that has a working copy of Swarm, 
I'd urge you to take a couple of steps in preparation.  First, get a 
good book on the C programming language.  If you can find a book that 
has the coverage of Objective-C as well, such as Steven Kochan's recent 
book, then that will be fine.  But the Objective-C part is not really 
necessary.  After you understand C, you can download a free book from 
the Apple website.  That's the one we colloquially call “the objective-C 
book” because, for a long time, it was the only book to be found on the 
subject.  I keep a copy of that book stashed here:

http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/ps905/ObjC.pdf

If you've only used programs before, but never written one, you will 
have to travel up a steep learning curve.  I've made that transition 
myself, and would urge you to be patient and to keep trying.  I think 
the best thing you could do for yourself is to avoid using MS Windows. 
Get a Unix or Linux Operating system of some sort, or get a Macintosh OS 
X, because that is a BSD Unix system underneath.  I've seen it with my 
own eyes—you can open up a terminal and interact with it as if it were 
really a Unix system.  MS Windows is still too frustrating for me.  I 
understand, lots of people use it, but that doesn't mean its right.

When I come to the Swarm tutorial, I'll bring some installation disks 
for the Fedora Core Linux distribution. If you want to erase a laptop, 
or if you have some free space, I'll walk you through an installation. 
Contact me ahead of time, we can schedule that. I'll be in Torino by June 4.

Paul E. Johnson
Professor
Political Science, University of Kansas


Pietro Terna wrote:
>         Hi all,
>
>         can you give me some advice on the unvaluated papers.
>
>         The situation is represented by the attached file. I'd like to 
> be the last in the reviewing process.
>
>         Yours, Pietro
>
> ---
> The world is full of interesting problems to be solved!
> Home page http://web.econ.unito.it/terna
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> SwarmFest2005 mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://www.swarm.org/mailman/listinfo/swarmfest2005


--
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn
1541 Lilac Lane, Rm 504
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66044-3177           FAX: (785) 864-5700