SwarmFest2005/Tutorial

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Pre-conference Tutorial

Teacher Paul Johnson assisted by Marco Lamieri and Michele Sonnessa.

Paul Johnson's message and material.; Marco Lamieri and Michele Sonnessa JavaSwarm presentation and distributed CD (related to the last ObjC and Java Swarm implementations).

Paul Johnson's post conference documentation [slides and code from the Swarm Tutorial].

I.Power Tour of Swarm Applications (1 hour)

 A. Consider an agent-based simulation. What are the defining characteristics? 
   i.What do the agents do? 
   ii. How do they interact (sense & effect each other)? 
       a) Do they “find each other” as individuals? 
       b) Do they respond to “environmental traces”? 
   iii. What is the Scheduling framework? 
       a) Do all agents act simultaneously? 
       b) Do they take “steps” in turn? 
       c) Dynamic, event-driven scheduling 
       d) Synchronous vs Asynchronous is a conceptual, not a Swarm, distinction 
 B.Survey and graphical demonstration: 
   i.Conway's Game of Life 
   ii. Schelling's Neighborhood Segregation Model 
   iii. Savage's Arborgames 
   iv. Santa Fe Artificial Stock Market 
   v. Latane & Nowak's Social Impact Model 
   vi. Heatbugs 
   vii. Mousetrap 
   viii. Huckfeldt & Johnson Opinion Formation Model 

II. How to get started (45 minutes)

 A. Installing Swarm 
 B. What Programming background is required 
 C. What every Swarm programmer needs these things 
   i.The Apple Obj-C book 
   ii. Swarm docs & user guide & Swarm FAQ 
   iii. swarmapps & the tutorial

III.Swarm Idioms

 A. Memory “zones” 
 B. createBegin/createEnd 
 C. Protocols (id <Activity>) versus (id) and (Activity *) 
 D. This will continue along with basic concepts I think are important.

IV.Anatomy of a Swarm Program: Swarm Sugar Scape (sss)

 A. This will not be massively different from the outline already online here

V.Adding a New Class in a Swarm Model: A Predator on the Sugar Scape

 A. The Handouts that go with this are online here

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