Swarm 1.4 Available

[Marcus G. Daniels]

To the collectively evolving,

The Swarm team at the Santa Fe Institute is pleased to announce that
Swarm 1.4 is ready. 

Significant new features in the release include:

  o Randomized execution order is implemented via the DefaultOrder
    protocol.

  o A new kind of Index, the PermutedIndex, allows for non-linear
    traversal through an index.  So far, this is limited to random ordering.
  
  o The Dynamic Scheduling Bug is dead.

  o Test suites -- we expect to add many such programs to ensure correct
    behavior of Swarm on any platform where Swarm builds.

  o Object serialization to HDF5 (http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5) and
    Scheme (http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/scheme-home.html).
  
    Object serialization makes it possible to read and write
    Swarm objects to permanent storage as well as between computers.

    The HDF5 serialization feature is intended to be useful in
    applications where there are large or large numbers of agents, and
    when these agents may be driven by dynamic datasets or processes
    external to Swarm.  HDF5 also supports parallel access to
    datasets.  

    We have enhanced the free statistical package R
    (http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/R) to read and write HDF5 files. 
    R provides a way to read text files into a form Swarm can use.  (R
    is a free clone of S-Plus.)
   
    The Scheme serialization feature is intended to facilitate both
    hand-edited and algorithmic maintenance of object state.  For example,
    window geometry is stored using the Scheme serialization feature.
    Eventually, we may provide the option of installing an interpreter
    in Swarm so that reading and writing of objects can be handled by
    user scripts.

  o Support for private colormaps

  o Support for Cygwin B20 -- GNU-Win32 B19 is no longer supported

  o Support for Tk >= 8.0.3 and new versions of Tk 8.1

  o Numerous bug fixes and minor usability improvements.
    [See the NEWS file for details.]

Please refer to the Swarm World Wide Web release page for download
URLs.  This release includes a Windows InstallShield installer, 
Sparc Solaris 2.5.1 and x86 Debian 2.0 binary install packages. 
x86 Redhat RPMs are on the way.

   http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/release.html