multi-swarms

[Nelson Minar]

I'll let Roger answer your particular questions, but I wanted to let
our Swarm users that the next release, the public beta on the 13th,
will contain real live examples of multiple swarms.

Our use of nested Swarms so far is for managing experiment control.
The basic setup for things like heatbugs involves two swarms:

A "Model Swarm", which contains all the simulated objects (the
heatbugs, the heatspace, etc) and the model schedules. 

An "Observer Swarm" which contains objects that view the simulation,
and the display schedule. In GUI mode, this will be the control panel,
the display widgets, the data analysis widgets. In batch mode (no
graphics) you use a different Observer Swarm, one that might contain
data analysis and file widgets.

The model swarm is then a subswarm of the observer swarm. The nice
thing about this split is that you can leave the model swarm the same,
but graft it into various different observer swarms for different
experiment modes.

So next week we'll have one example of using multiswarms. We won't
have an example yet of having a model with multiple Swarms inside it,
but the structure should be the same as the observer/model split.