The Weekly Pheromone Volume II, Issue 2

[glen e. p. ropella]

                         The Weekly Pheromone
                          Volume 2, Issue 2
                          February 26, 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.  Swarm 1.0.1 Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You
  II.  SwarmFest '97 Report
 III.  New or Revised Links on User Community Page
       A.  Barry's TipsyBugs App
       B.  Catherine Dibble's Papers
       D.  JJ's GA and Neuro Libraries
       E.  Melissa's Arborgames Model

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

   I.  Swarm 1.0.1 Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You

   We are preparing to release Swarm 1.0.1 pretty soon.  We plan on
having several bug fixes and some possible extensions.  Some
candidates for inclusion are:

   - Barry's fix so the Raster doesn't clear the screen with the
     background color any time it's occluded,
   - Extraneous printf's removed from the random library,
   - Convenience method for the creation of custom ProbeMaps and
     a change to make the default ProbeMap consist of the instance
     variables of the class of the object being probed,
   - Automatic probe notification when a probed object is dropped,
   - Automatic activity index updates so that schedules used 
     dynamically will catch actions scheduled earlier than the 
     currently indexed time for that schedule.

   There are a few other things we intend to put in, but are unsure of
their difficulty.  And, so we won't commit to them until later.


  II.  SwarmFest '97 Report

   We have prepared a minimal report on the goings on of SwarmFest
'97.  In the spirit of my fledgling attempts at LaTeX so that I 
can start work on the Swarm Manual, I've done this report in LaTeX
and used latex2html to convert it to html.  Please read it and give
us feedback on any mistakes and whether or not the format is OK.
(Some people do not like latex2html.)  It's at:

  http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/users/Misc/
        SwarmFest/SwarmFest-report/SwarmFest-report.html


 III.  New or Revised Links on User Community Page

       A.  Barry's TipsyBugs App

   Barry has graciously contributed his TipsyBugs application, which
is what he uses to prototype objects and new ways of doing things.  I
think it's an important example of some of the ideas he presented at
SwarmFest and could give some ideas as to how to do things in other
contexts.  An example would be the differences between the "hex" and
rectangular lattices.

       B.  Catherine Dibble's Papers

   Catherine passed on some web links before SwarmFest that I just
didn't have time to get to.  But, they're there now and give a good
intro to some of the problems in modelling (esp. modelling CASes)
couched in her particular field.

       D.  JJ's GA and Neuro Libraries

   JJ Merelo has successfully ported both his GA (now called Breeder)
and Neuro libraries to Swarm 1.0.0.  Please take a look at these two
libraries and try to coordinate with JJ about different ways GA's or
NN's could be used in Swarm.  Both these techniques of adapting
behavior of agents are extremely useful and can be done in a huge
variety of ways.  We'd like to design robust libraries that could
handle as much flexibility as possible, which might require alot of
conversation between the GA and NN gurus out there.

       E.  Melissa's Arborgames Model

   Melissa is allowing us to put her Arborgames model (as seen at
SwarmFest '97) on our ftp site.  Arborgames is a model of forest
dynamics whose goal is to examine the role of fire on species
diversity.  One of the many interesting things in this model is the
use of multiple rasters to show different cuts of the space.  In this
case, the same region is covered by rasters for the young forest, the
mature forest, and fire.

                              =========

The Swarm Bulletin 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