Swarm Bulletin Volume I, Issue 2

[glen e. p. ropella]

                            Swarm Bulletin
                          Volume 1, Issue 2
                          December 2, 1996


   This Bulletin will stand to inform users of the activities and
goals of the hive and user community.  Contributions are accepted that
announce Swarm-related events or activities in any of the growing
Swarm colonies around the world.  To contribute, send e-mail to
address@hidden  It would seem to be beneficial to relax the
constraint of publishing a bulletin each week.  So, the bulletin will
come out on Monday if and only if there is information that needs
dissemination.

Table of Contents
-----------------

   I.  User Community Page Update
       A. Fabrice Chantemargue's Vision library
  II.  New Mousetrap demo.

========================================================================

   I.  User Community Page Update

       A. Fabrice Chantemargue's Vision library

   Fabrice Chantemargue has generously donated a library that
implements a rudimentary "vision" mechanism.  The code speaks for
itself (which means the documentation is pretty sparse).  But, the
VisionDemo gives a hint at how the library can be used.  Fabrice has
promised more updates and a more sophisticated demonstration at the
SwarmFest.  In the meantime, comments are welcome to either
swarm-support or <address@hidden>.

Ref: http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/users/user-community.html

  II.  New Mousetrap demo

   Chris Langton has improved the comments and added a batchmode to
the mousetraps application.  He's also added a README and the third
mouse button probe capability for each trap.  If anybody didn't quite
understand the purpose for mousetraps before, take a look at the new
and improved mousetraps.

   You'll notice that the release of this new Mousetrap demo paved the
way for a new modular release.  Just for the heck of it, there's a new
Heatbugs also (there are no significant changes in the new heatbugs).
This is a trial release idea using our internal CVS (Concurrent
Version System) symbolic tag as the version indicator.  The version
numbers corresponding to the versions of mousetraps, heatbugs, market,
and template are listed in parentheses in the description of the
961002 release.  And it is expected that major releases will still be
packaged as a whole.  But, for incremental releases of individual
demos, this will be used to save download time.  If this is amenable
to the users, then something like it will be adopted for the Swarm
packages also.  Likely modules will be the given directories under the
swarm/src directory: activity, analysis, collections, defobj, ...
This could get sticky in some cases because often the new version of
one module will require an update of another module.  In that
situation, we expect to release interdependent modules simultaneously
and provide a dependency map that tells which versions go together.

   Once again, please let us know how (and whether) you like this
module by module release method.  There're lots of options and we're
not necessarily set on this one.



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The Swarm Bulletin is created by the members of the Swarm project at
the Santa Fe Institute.  Comments, corrections, and contributions
should be sent to address@hidden