Course on Swarm at UCLA

[Benedikt Stefansson]

The UCLA Department of Political Science will be sponsoring an informal
course/seminar on Swarm programming this Winter quarter (First day of
UCLA Winter quarter is January 12th and last day of instruction is March
20th). The instructor will be yours truly. We are still putting final
touches on the syllabus, and some details need to be finalized but
tentative meeting times are Monday and Wednesday mornings 11:00-12:15
(after the fifth week we will be meeting only on Wednesdays). Classroom
is TBA.

The objective of the course is to help social science faculty and
students
that are interested in agent based modeling to get comfortable
programming in C, introduce the fundamentals of Object Oriented
Programming and the Swarm libraries.

Included is a rough outline of the course.  Please refer to the
following
web page for further information, which I will be updating with data
such as
seminar hours and location:

    http://cce.sscnet.ucla.edu/swarmcourse/syllabusW98.html

Anyone who is interested in Swarm is invited to attend. Feel free to
distribute this information widely to people you know who might be
interested. I would be happy to hear from those who are interested in
attending the seminar so that we can better gauge the interest and plan
accordingly.

Outline:

I.Week - Introduction to Swarm and overview of the course
        1.Introduction and demonstration of Swarm capabilities.
        2.Overview - programming tools and evolution of a simulation
program.

II-IV Week - The C programming language
        3.Basic data types and operators.
        4.Control and data flow.

        5.Functions and program structure. Input and output.
        6.Memory allocation and data (pointers and arrays).

        7.Memory allocation and data (cont).
        8.Practical programming - the editor, compiler and debugger.

V. Week - Object Oriented Programming
        9.Introduction to Object Oriented Programming.
       10.Objective-C syntax.

VI. Week - Swarm: first steps
       11.Evolving a simple model from basic C, to Objective-C to Swarm.

VII-VII.Week - The Swarm libraries
       12.Structure of a Swarm program, schedules and collections.
       13.Probe library and graphical output.

IX.-X Week - Swarm in practice
       14.Case studies and  Implementations, e.g. Epstein and Axtell
            (Sugarscape), Schelling's segregation model and Axelrod's
culture model.
       15.Adaptive Agents, implementation and practical problems. GAs,
ANNs
            Finite State Machines and other algorithms.

------------------
Benedikt Stefansson                 address@hidden
Department of Economics, UCLA       Fax. (310) 825-9528
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477          Tel. (310) 825-4126



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