Re: [Swarm-Modelling] newbie question

[gepr]

Marcus G. Daniels writes:
 > > In that case, why are there all these new (apparently) copycat 
 > > closed-source software projects now??
 > 
 > I wouldn't say DIAS is a copy cat, or new.   But a national lab is a 
 > good hidey hole for projects with some political support but sketchy 
 > scientific support.  

To add to what Marcus and Scott have already said, I think the reason
for the growth in "agent" tools is simply because we're anthropocentric
and getting worse all the time. [grin]

There is some type of draw to the metaphor of agents (which is just
a new word for component, which is just a fancy word for "box").
Nobody really knows what this draw is, though everybody and their 
brother will have an opinion on it (and claim that their opinion is
the truth).

The real decision point you're facing is, as Scott points out, what
underlying platform do you want to work on top of?  Swarm provides 
a complicated and baroque, but _rich_ landscape upon which to work.
And you can puncture the Swarm layer and go into Objective-C or C
or the infrastructure for GCC pretty easily.

Some packages, like RePast or JAS, provide similar "programming"
environments, but are implemented atop "safer" languages like Java or
Python.  It's easy to puncture the platform down to programmer or API
level, but, not so much to "systems" level of mucking with pipes and
integrating peculiar things.

Then other packages like Arena or PowerSim provide explicitly 
defined formalisms or logical abstraction layers that are hard to 
puncture.

The type of platform you choose has implications to who's going 
to be working with it (sysadmins, programmers, domain experts, 
etc.), maintainability, expected lifetime, the ecology of contributors,
the development process, etc.

-- 
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                           Hail Eris!
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