Swarm SFI-Hive Pheromone, December 1998

[Marcus G. Daniels]

                     The Swarm SFI-Hive Pheromone
                          Volume 3, Issue 7
                          December 20, 1998


   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 if and only if there 
is information to be disseminated.


Table of Contents
-----------------
   I. Happy Holidays from the Swarm     
  II. SwarmFest '99 Announcement
 III. Version 1.4 Update


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   I. Happy Holidays!

Best wishes for the Holidays and the New Year from the Swarm team!


  II. Swarmfest '99 Announcement

The UCLA Center for Comparative Political Economy, in collaboration
with the Swarm Program at the Santa Fe Institute, is pleased to sponsor
SwarmFest '99, the third annual meeting of the Swarm User Group.
SwarmFest '99 will begin on Saturday evening, March 27th and continue
through Monday, March 29th, 1999 at the Anderson School of Management
at the University of California, Los Angeles.  

At SwarmFest, researchers from diverse disciplines get a chance to
share their knowledge and experiences with agent modeling and the
Swarm toolkit.  We will also review the results of the annual Swarm
survey and help set directions for Swarm development.  The program
is designed both for knowledgeable Swarm users and for anyone
interested in agent-based modeling.  In addition to the conference,
we are considering an introductory tutorial on Swarm during the day
on Saturday, March 27.

Please send proposals for presentations, demonstrations, breakout
sessions, or any other suggestions to address@hidden
More details on program submissions and on registration and housing
will posted on the Swarm mailing lists shortly after the New Year;
we hope to hold registration fees to roughly the same as last year.
Come join us at the UCLA hive in Los Angeles to advance the state
of the art in agent simulation!


  III. Swarm version 1.4 update

Swarm version 1.4 is underway with an expected release date of
January 15, 1999.  A longstanding bug in the scheduling machinery
has been eliminated: schedules can now update each other with actions
to be run at an immediately pending time.  Unwanted effects of
sequential execution can be avoided in a model by options to randomize
execution order and to indicate schedules and action groups that could
run actions concurrently.  These features help fill out the functions
of the activity library and provide a foundation for parallel execution
that can scale to large and complex simulations.

To help support data mining and complex agent landscapes, Swarm 1.4
provides two object serialization backends: a textual description
language based on the Scheme programming language
(http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/scheme-home.html), and a platform
independent data format for scientific datasets called HDF5
(http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu).  The serialization features in Swarm 1.4
will soon serve to migrate objects across computers and languages in 
future versions of Swarm.

Finally, we have enhanced the R (http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/R) statistical
package to support the HDF5 format.  R can be used to prepare datasets
for Swarm and can load HDF5 output from a Swarm simulation for further
statistical analysis.