The Weekly Pheromone Vol. 3, Issue 1

[glen e. p. ropella]

                         The Weekly Pheromone
                          Volume 3, Issue 1
                             Aug 06, 1997


   The Pheromone 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  The Pheromone is mailed out on Tuesday (or....
maybe Wednesday) if and only if there is information to be
disseminated.

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

   I. SFI picks up the Swarm Development Program!
  II. Job Descriptions
 III. New Stuff from the Users
      A. Kauffman Boolean Network Library
      B. ZoomRaster Movies
      C. 3D Graphics Player
      D. Potential Field Application
      E. SugarScape in Swarm
      F. New FAQ Maintainer
  IV. Java GUI Progress Report
        
========================================================================

   I. SFI picks up the Swarm Development Program!

Good news about the future of Swarm!

  The Santa Fe Institute Science Steering Committee has recently 
voted unanimously to underwrite the Swarm program for another
year - at an increased level of effort. 

  This means that we will be able to hire two (2) full time
programmers to take on the further development, documentation,
and maintainence of Swarm. These two slots will be as follows:

  1) a Kernel Developer, who will be responsible for the 
     further development of the Swarm kernel and core 
     libraries, and the development of the parallel kernel.

  2) a Library Developer, who will be responsible for 
     enhancing the various libraries, both general tools
     and domain specific libraries. 

  A primary task for both of these people will be to greatly
enhance the usability of Swarm, now that the core machinery
is largely in place.

  Both of these positions will also be responsible for maintaining
the relationship with the Swarm user-community, through the
various mail-lists and via the Swarm web-pages.

  In addition, we are in the process of forming an official 
non-profit corporation to be the Swarm.org. As we have detailed
before, the Swarm.org will generally take on the structure
of a Swarm with sub-swarms! The main organization will simply
consist of an administrative board, who will be responsible
for maintaining the overall direction of the Swarm package,
and will serve as a resource to help coordinate the various 
development efforts taking place in the Swarm community. 

These latter development efforts will effectively be sub-swarms 
to the Swarm.org,  call them ".orglets" if you will. 

Any group who is putting up at least a reasonable fraction of an 
FTE for work on Swarm that is intended to be put back into the 
public-domain qualifies as a .orglet, and should get in touch 
with us for "official" recognition as a Swarm.orglet, and 
to facilitate coordination with other development efforts.

So far, we have about 5 groups who currently fall into the .orglet 
category:

  1) SFI - The core kernel and library development effort that 
           SFI has now agreed to underwrite at the level of 2.5 FTE.

  2) The Physical Sciences Laboratory at New Mexico State University 
           is putting up a 2.5 FTE effort in the area of specific
           applications and libraries in areas of interest to the
           military - indeed, the PSL may turn into a Swarm.mil 
           organization to handle contracts for extensions to 
           Swarm that are of interest to the military or other
           government organizations.

  3) The Complex Systems group at the University of Michigan - 
           Rick Riolo, Ted Belding, and others have been 
           developing tools and libraries for use with Swarm,
           including the Drone experiment management package,
           and a rumored parameter-management object or library.

  4) Sven Thommesen - who has been doing heroic work on the
           Random Number library. He is funded by the School of
           Human Sciences at Auburn University and the National
           Textile Center, to whom we are very grateful.

  5) The Complex Systems Laboratory at Central European University,
           in Budapest. Folks here are working on better visualization
           tools for Swarm simulations, and are thinking about how
           to add a visual-programming interface to Swarm. Jack
           Corliss, the director of the Lab, is putting up at
           least a 2FTE effort for the forseeable future.
  
 We have hopes that in the near future there will be a .orglet that
is devoting its efforts to enhancing the interactivity between Swarm
and various GIS packages. Also, a few of us are starting a Swarm.com,
which will almost certainly kick back funding and/or effort to the
basic Swarm.org enterprise.

  In addition, we have had a number of verbal offers recently for
support for specific enhancements to Swarm, as Intel is doing
in support of getting Swarm to run in the PC world. Now that the
SFI has made a very specific committment to supporting the future
existence and further development of the Swarm package, we are
in a much better position to take on contracts for other enhancements 
to Swarm that will become freely available to the Swarm user community. 

So if you are a group or organization who has been considering providing
funding to the Swarm effort for a specific enhancement to Swarm,
such as a parallel version or something else, or if you've been 
awaiting proof that Swarm will continue into the indefinite future
before you start putting effort into it yourselves, then now is the 
time to step forward and let us know what you need from Swarm and/or
what you can do to help the effort along....We have clearly survived
the proof-of-principle stage, and there are now an increasing number
of groups who are willing to kick in effort and/or funding to 
enhance the core-package. At this point we are only limited by
resources - there is a lot to do yet to make Swarm more usable
by a greater variety of researchers, but the more resources we
have devoted to the effort, the quicker we can get there.

Other groups who are kicking in to support the Swarm effort are
John Deere, Intel, JWAC, NSF....

                               --------

  II. Job Descriptions

   There are two positions open: a Kernel Programmer and a Library
Programmer.  Both positions are guaranteed for 1 year with the
possibility of continuing on past that year.

JOB DESCRIPTION: Kernel Programmer
                  
  Reports to:      Vice President of Academic Affairs & Swarm Development Group
  Salary Level:    Exempt, Research Technician (37.5 hours per week)
                   $52,000 to $62,000 depending on applicable experience
  
  
  Summary:
  Continues development of the Swarm kernel and folds in new requirements.
  Packages releases.  Coordinates bug reports and change requests.
  Coordinates with the Swarm Development Group; keeps Swarm Development
  Group informed of progress.  Provides informal work direction to Library 
  Programmer.
  
  This is an SFI full-time position for one year only.  There is a 
  possibility, based on progress made during that year, that the 
  position may be extended as part of a new organizational structure
  under the Swarm Development Group.
  
  JOB REQUIREMENTS
  
  Graduate-level degree or equivalent experience in a scientific field.
  5 years' experience programming in a similar environment.
  5 years' managing a similar software project.
  Demonstrated, solid experience in developing and fielding software.
  Demonstrated experience in most of the following:
     o operating systems and programming language development.
     o software project management.
     o OOP and concurrent systems.
     o simulation (more than one type).
     o C (Objective-C and Java are plusses).
     o implementing and using a formalized software process.
     o responding to the needs of a diverse user community.
     o incorporating freely available software.
     o GNU tools.
  
  RESPONSIBILITIES
  
     The primary responsibility is to continue the development of the Swarm 
  kernel and to fold in new requirements in such a way as to ensure the
  quality and robustness of the code.  Will also package releases and
  coordinate bug reports and change requests for incorporation into the
  kernel. Will coordinate with the Swarm Development Group (SDG) in
  directing the Swarm kernel development for the short- and long-term future.
  Will provide informal work direction to Library Programmer, to efficiently
  share or divide project tasks.  Examples of work to be done are: continue
  the development of the logical concurrency model, the memory management,
  and the object customization methodology, as well as implement garbage
  collection and complete the elements of the Swarm development environment.


JOB DESCRIPTION: Library Programmer
                  
  Reports to:      Vice President for Academic Affairs & SDG
  Salary Level:    Exempt Professional (37.5 hours per week)
                   $32,000 to $42,000 depending on applicable
                   experience
 
  
  Summary:
  Will fold users' requests for new functionality into existing Swarm
  libraries or new ones.  Keeps Kernal Programmer informed of progress.
  Coordinates with the Swarm Development Group (SDG).
  
  This is an SFI full-time position for one year only.  There is a 
  possibility, based on progress made during that year, that the 
  position may be extended as part of a new organizational structure
  under the Swarm Development Group.
  
  JOB REQUIREMENTS
  
  Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in a scientific field.
  Minimum 2 years' experience programming in similar environment.
  Minimum 2 years' managing a similar software project.
  Must demonstrate ability to develop this software to meet diverse and
     ambiguous requirements in response to the needs of the user community.
 
  Demonstrated experience in the following:
     o OOP and concurrent systems.
     o C (Objective-C and Java are plusses).
     o responding to the needs of a diverse user community.
     o GNU tools.
     o writing and maintaining distributable software.
 
  Preferred:
  Familiarity with designing user interfaces.
  Familiarity with diverse application domains.
  
  RESPONSIBILITIES
  
  The primary responsibility will be to fold users' requests for new 
  functionality, to be added to Swarm, into existing libraries or new ones.  
  Keeps Kernal Programmer informed of progress.  Examples of work to be
  done are: design and implement data structure and class hierarchy browsers,
  tools for debugging dynamic schedules, analysis tools, spatial data
  structures, and visualization tools.
 
 
  To apply for either of these positions, please send a copy of
your resume and a letter describing the experience that you think
qualifies you for the position by August 30, 1997 to:

   E-mail: address@hidden  (Postscript, PDF, or ASCII only!)

   Post:   Swarm
           Santa Fe Institute
           1399 Hyde Park Road
           Santa Fe NM 87501

   NO PHONE CALLS, please.  Resumes and applications received after
August 30, 1997 will not be considered.


                                --------

 III. New Stuff from the Users

   We have alot of new contributions from the user community.  And,
unfortunately, alot of them haven't made it to the web page or into
the Swarm release, yet.  But, rest assured, they will.  Here are the
ones that I've managed to put up on the User Community page.

      A. Kauffman Boolean Network Library

   Alex Lancaster of the Mental Health Research Institute in
Melbourne, Australia kindly donated his Boolean Network Library.  We
are intending to put this one through the ringer for our contributed
software evaluation process.  So, please check out his code and send
us and him comments.

      B. ZoomRaster Movies

   While teaching Swarm at the Central European University for their
Complex Systems summer school, Nelson and Benedikt threw together
a couple of packages that allow one to save ZoomRaster screens to 
disk and play them back, even if one is running in batch mode!  Check
these out!  They may not be the final solution to saving and replaying
data; but, they should provide an excellent start.

      C. 3D Graphics Player

   Patrick McNeill at the Institute for Defense Analysis has contributed
his Player Version 1.6, which will play back 3 dimensional data saved 
during a Swarm simulation run.  It uses OpenGL (on SGIs) or Mesa 2.2 on
other platforms.  Since Swarm is a little lean on the visualization front,
this is Manna!

      D. Potential Field Application

   Artan Simeqi from the University of Shkodra in Albania contributed
his model of the equipotential contour map of the electric field
created by fixed point charges.  This is really fun to play with and
could provide the basis for an "electric space" within which charge 
sensitive agents live.

      E. SugarScape in Swarm

   Nelson has implemented the rudimentary aspects of SugarScape in
Swarm (SSS).  He worked from the descriptions and examples provided in
Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell's book "Growing Artificial
Societies."  It could serve as a base for implementing more
sophisticated versions of the Sugarscape models. It was originally
written for a series of lectures on Swarm and complex systems
modelling.

      F. New FAQ Maintainer

   Paul Johnson at the University of Kansas has stepped up, at least
tentatively [grin], to take on maintenance of the FAQ.  He's doing
a great job and already has 2 sections revamped.  I don't know if 
we should put it directly on the Swarm web site or just replace the
current FAQ with links to his web site.  But, until we get it all
straightened out, check out:

  http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/linux/


   Some of the things yet to be incorporated into either the web pages
or the Swarm distribution are:

  - Sven's new Random 0.7 and his MoGrid and MoXGrid
  - Nelson's modifications to Discrete 2d
  - Roger's patches for debugging support and nil_method fixes
  - Erik's contribution of MultiDiscrete2d and MultiObject2dDisplay
  - Jason's fixes to ObjectLoader and sundry other pieces
  - Davi's example usage of MPI to spawn and manage distributed Swarms
  - Larry's Swarm class browser
  - Glen's patches to libtclobjc-1.1b6 for proper execution on an Alpha
  - and I'm sure I'm missing a billion other things...

                               --------

  IV. Java GUI Progress Report

   Doug reports successful compilation and execution of heatbugs
in batchmode on a Windows NT machine.  The software is in no way
ready for dissemination; but, this milestone means that the kernel
is functioning despite the absence of the Tcl/Tk GUI.  The next
step in the project is to design the control mechanism we will use
to execute Swarm in a Java environment and to define the extent of
the interface between Java and Objective C that we will implement.
Again, don't ask for a batchmode-only version.  We will distribute
no Swarm before it's warm.  (Sorry, to those of you who didn't watch
television in the seventies. [grin]  To those of you who did watch
the tele in the seventies... you deserved it!)

                              =========

The Swarm Pheromone is created by the members of the Swarm project at
the Santa Fe Institute.  For more information on the Swarm Project,
see http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm.  Comments, corrections, and
contributions should be sent to address@hidden