On Mar 21, 2014 6:35 AM, "Patrik Nordwall" <[email protected]>
wrote:
> There must be a more scalable way of designing large scale wildlife
simulations, but I have no experience of that domain.

(Don't know the Ants app, but did spend a while in the videogame business,
which pertains to this.)

It's a fascinating problem, actually.  The issue is that a naive simulator,
designed for one machine, usually assumes simultaneity - there is a
constant systemwide clock that all entities respect, and interactions
between entities are more or less synchronous.  Presumably the old STM
version was mimicking that.  That has a hard time scaling across a large
cluster, though.

Not sure what the answer is, but I would bet that the MMORPG industry has
done a lot of work on the topic.  At a guess, I would observe that you
mostly care about *local* synchrony rather than global.  So it seems like
you might be able to build an approximate but functional simulator by
dividing the space into an octtree of actors, which arbitrate the
interactions of the creatures in those spaces.  Instead of committing
transactions, the creature and space actors cooperate to decide what
happens in each go around.  (Basically, set up an internal architecture
that mimics the way that player interactions work in a typical online game.)

That's just an offhand guess, but it seems like it should work...

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