Re: Catalog of agents

[John A. Lopez]

glen e. p. ropella wrote:
> 
> Sven N. Thommesen writes:
>  > Which leads me to a suggestion for 'someone' to do:
>  >
>  > the essence of Swarm modelling is, of course, the behavioral
>  > methods of our agents. I'd like to see a web site collect
>  > a catalog of different behavioral methods people have used,
>  > described in pseudo-code and/or source code. (Similar to
>  > Prof. Eckart's collection of CA models.) This would allow
>  > others to test out the posted methods, and to critique them.
>  > Over time, we might get an idea of which algorithms are
>  > useful and which not for given applications.
>  >
>  > Any takers ?
> 
> This is an excellent idea.  Of course, more than just the
> agent methods should be described, I would guess.  But,
> it might be reasonable to compress the "essence" of a
> model with descriptive pseudo-code for the agent types
> and their respective methods, and the environment design
> and it's respective methods.  The one element left is the
> scheduling.
> 
> Developing compact descriptions of these three elements
> might even help us with the Schedule-language specification
> when and if we start working seriously on that.  A language
> needs  well-specified data types (agents and environments)
> as well as well-specified operator types.
> 
> As far as takers for the task.... Brad?
> 
> glen

Sven and Glen,

I think this is more than an excellent idea, since this list would
necessarily evolve to discipline-specific lists. Such posted methods
could be improved upon or varied in ways which could form the basis of a
dialog (parallelog?) within a research discipline (mine is
anthropology/archaeology). I'd be more than happy to post my kinship,
mimicry, and the other behavioral methods I've developed or am working
on.

In light of the recent discussion regarding future funding and
non-profit organization structure, we could take a lesson from Swarm.
This idea of a methods listing could be a source for SFI income: users
could pay some individual or institutional fee for specific downloads of
methods (available free to contributers within a class of course).
Perhaps the SFI folks could continue to make its server available and
act as a GA and cull those discussions which have little or no 
interest.

John


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