Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?
It's all fine and good to try to lower the cost of entry to ABM, but to get science done ABMers need a way to say something precise and have it understood by theorists. Pretty visual programming systems, GIS, etc. don't necessarily accomplish that. I totally agree, and indeed we've looked into more analytic tools for modeling. Certainly at the surface level, tools that help you know how stable your results are are important (i.e. take the derivative of your model, so to speak). Ditto for good design of experiments aids which give good hints at where your model should be studied most .. where are the interesting areas. And indeed, many of our models could have a more mathematical component. Hmm..that gets me back to the earlier discussion on the gap between computing and math. But in that sphere, one of the better talks given at the SFI BusNet was of researchers using both modeling and math together, until the math had to assume a spherical cow so to speak, and plotting their divergence But the bigger picture of my wish is precisely that: we need to build a far broader set of easily integrated tools for ABM. Far more important is the synergy amongst them than their ease of use. -- Owen Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net On Dec 31, 2006, at 11:29 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: Well, from our side of the world, obviously a killer simulation environment. I recently watched an interview on the Research Channel with Anders Hejisberg, inventor of Turbo Pascal and C#. A former project manager of his at Borland was talking about their abandoned visual programming project, Monet, that Anders was involved in before joining Microsoft. Anders remarked that sometimes a single line of code is often worth a thousand pictures. You die a slow death of a thousand lines going from here to there. [An example of the lines being the object/message connections i.e. MacOS X Interface Builder.] It's all fine and good to try to lower the cost of entry to ABM, but to get science done ABMers need a way to say something precise and have it understood by theorists. Pretty visual programming systems, GIS, etc. don't necessarily accomplish that. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?
Owen Densmore wrote: Just a poll of sorts: 1 - If you/we were to start an open source project, what would it be? 2 - What open source project would you like to see happen? I'd like to see an interactive functional language like Haskell improved to quickly compile and distribute code across a set of compute nodes, and to at the same time support either homogeneous or heterogeneous node architectures while minimizing the cost of using either to the best extent possible. I'd like to be able to checkpoint very large computations with minimal overhead and be confident about the integrity of live jobs migrated between machines as well as jobs that were restarted from hibernation.I'd like maps over sets, tree searches, etc. to all parallelize automatically and adaptively depending on the compute fabric provided.Basically, I'd like features of Chapel or X10 reworked into a purely functional type of language and I'd like it to WORK and not just be an academic exercise. I'd like a language that could support use cases like ABM or Genetic Programming such that evolution of agents and objects was completely natural and very efficient. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?
1 - If you/we were to start an open source project, what would it be? Well, from our side of the world, obviously a killer simulation environment. This would include a pipe or port interoperability amongst many useful components including the agent modeler, landscape/gis agent environment, visualization, graphing/plotting, analysis and statistics, inference engine, and more. And to cap it off, a visual composition editor letting you hook all this together with drag 'n drop and form based agent behavior. It would be multi-lingual where possible: java for multi-platform and performance, python and other agile languages for scripting. The pipe/port interoperability should have specific goals like being able to run on top of Google Earth, for example. 2 - What open source project would you like to see happen? EZ Java: a preprocessor/IDE which makes Java less programmer antagonistic .. to remove the syntactic salt as Steve sez. It would simply preprocess a python/ruby-like front end, but simply be a syntax converter .. not another scripting language for the JVM such as JRuby, Jython, Groovy etc. It would be independent of the particular version of Java .. thus inherit the improvements within Java. But like Processing, it would remove the absurdities of Java. Examples: - First class functions, without the need for a class for main() - Less redundant type declarations: String s = new String() is a little noisy. - Simple syntax for Functors .. which make easy on-the-fly closures. - First class citizens for maps, arrays and strings with very flexible literals. One obvious string improvement, for example, are multi-line strings, strings with substitutions, and most of all, raw strings for regex use. This could easily be done with ANTLR, I think. Integrating it into Eclipse and other programming editors and IDEs would be important. -- Owen Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net On Dec 30, 2006, at 10:39 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: Just a poll of sorts: 1 - If you/we were to start an open source project, what would it be? 2 - What open source project would you like to see happen? -- Owen Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
