Re: Sub-swarms

[Benedikt Stefansson]

     Hi,

Alex wrote:

     I am really trying to push
     the Swarm envelope and re-usability as much as possible.  I
     believe
     that a good general purpose experiment manager "library" is
     vital to
     Swarm, and definitely needs more attention.

I would like to second this last statement. I think we should have a
discussion at Swarmfest (and on-line here for those who are not able to
attend) about the best methods to
    a) control experiments
    b) extract and visualize data from multiple runs.

I'm sure that there is no one solution that fits all, but it will be
very useful to share hard won experience and learn more about the types
of solutions others have come up with.

Quite a few Swarmers for example have rolled their own Perl scripts or
used other methods to control parameter sweeps in experiments, which may
be more efficient than trying to do the same from within Swarm (for
example it enables poor-man's-parallelism on multiprocessor machines).

But the ideas that Alex mentioned in his post certainly seem intriguing
- who wouldn't want to be able to "fast forward" through initial runs
and then visualize at will when something interesting comes up?

On point b) - I've not been able to find a satisfying way to treat data
sets from ABMs, which I would like to manipulate and visualize with an
object oriented relational data base. I'm sure that the GIS people know
much more about the types of tools that are out there and look forward
to learning from them.

-Benedikt

------------------
Benedikt Stefansson                 address@hidden
Department of Economics, UCLA       Fax. (310) 825-9528
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477          Tel. (310) 825-1777



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