Chris Langton & Roger Burkhart
Santa Fe Institute
We reviewed our original inspirations and goals for Swarm and described how far we have progressed toward realizing those goals with V1.0
Tim Kohler, Eric Carr, & Jim Kresl
Dept. of Anthropology
Washington State University
In this model, 400 years worth of prehistoric climatic data forms the world in which agents representing family units carry out farming maize, trading, and occasionaly moving to (hopefully!) more fertile ground. The goal is to test hypotheses about observed changes in settlement patterns over time.
Barry McMullin
Swarm Project
Santa Fe Institute
Barry is using the artificial chemistry SCL to study cellular self-organization by looking at necessary and sufficient properties for the support of a membrane whose elements are constantly breaking down. He has reimplemented and improved on an algorithm originally published by Varella and Maturana on their "autopoeitic" theory of cellular self-production and maintainence.
Ginger Booth
Center for Computational Ecology
Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies
Gecko is a general purpose ecological simulation platform for studying a large spectrum of ecosystem dynamics. The Swarm implementation of Gecko is its third incarnation. (Ginger also won the "Queen Bee" award at the SwarmFest!)
Matt Hare
Macaulay Land Use Research Institute
Aberdeen Scotland
Weaver is a tool for comparing and contrasting multiple models, or multiple assumption-sets over a single model. Matt has used Swarm in combination with a truth-maintainence system to determine different ranges of applications of different models purporting to represent the same ecosystem - Red Grouse populations in Scotland. With his tool, he is able to determine overlapping or conflicting assumptions made in different models, with an eye toward determining sets of tests to discriminate between various models and their applicability. Weaver is also intended to help manage comparison with real-world data and the many stray bits and pieces of "expert" knowledge accumulated about an ecosystem.
Thomas Gudmunsson
Danish Hydraulic Institute
The Danish Hydraulic Institute is applying Swarm to a number of problems in aquatic ecosystems. In particular Thomas and Vladan Babovic are looking at adding "flow-spaces" to Swarm, which would basicly be vector-fields overlaying a spatial domain and affecting things like diffusion and erosion. These flow-spaces might also change dynamically in time as a consequence of interactions with other processes in the model.