Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Something Glen said

[Marcus G. Daniels]

glen e. p. ropella wrote:
> Yes.  But, the SDG still believes that it should use donations for
> things like porting the current Swarm to new architectures.  _I_ think
> such efforts are, at best, a waste of money or, at worst, unethical.
>   
The SDG has thrown out some ideas for future work, and indeed some of 
them are mine.
I do agree it is helpful if the Swarm community makes technical 
suggestions to the SDG.   Unfortunately the SDG is a very conservative 
and slow moving organization, mainly because there is little money to 
create motivation for work and leadership.
At this point I hope to convince the SDG to become more of a research 
organization, even if all that they can do is be cheerleaders.  Indeed I 
don't think it is worthless to improve the existing Swarm, as there are 
good modelers that do use it.   I don't even think that it matters if 
there is evidence of contribution to the package by outsiders -- that's 
mostly a unrealistic expectation in any case. 

But Swarm software improvements are one possible task though.   Another 
idea that I don't think Steve Railsback posted (that we did discuss) was 
to investigate formal model description and reasoning technologies.    
Incidentally, I don't think we should put our energies into Repast.  
Repast is doing fine by itself, and frankly the SDG doesn't really have 
software engineers to offer.   Well, there's me, but I already have a 
job and my view of Repast is frankly "been there, done that". What we do 
have are people on the SDG that know computer science and application 
domains.  Of course, one of is not you, Glen.  You'll recall you 
threatened to resign if the SDG voted to pay me to make a maintenance 
release a few years ago.