Re: Open source? -> Need to read source to model?

[Darren Schreiber]

I guess I am going to now throw my $.02 in.  After learning Basic in
elementary school and Pascal in high school, I returned from a ten year
absence to programming in Swarm.  Last January, the Swarm class I took from
Benedikt and Lars-Erik was my first inroad.  And, over the course of the
next ten months I went from zero to a completed model (see link in my
signature line.)

During that entire time, I only used the open-source aspect of Swarm once.
There was an aspect that I just wasn't getting from the ref-books and
didn't even understand well enough to ask an intelligible question.  In
that case, being able to read the source code was useful.  But, that was
about nine-months into my experience with Swarm.

The biggest helps in my Swarm journey were the classroom instruction (a
luxury I realize most don't get), the swarm-support mail list (which I used
extensively), and reading other people's code.  Next would be the notes
from Benedikt & Lars-Erik's class (available on the web) and Paul Johnson's
User Guide.  The refbooks rarely led me toward a solution.

The single biggest difficulty I had was in getting all the graphics to work
correctly.  With regard to nodes... the documentation was sparse, the
classroom instruction had been nil, the user guide didn't mention it, and
only one example program I had (BankSim) made use of them.  Overcoming the
difficulty came from studying the one example I had and asking lots and
lots of questions...

Ideally, an agent-based modelling system would not require 10 months of
pretty hard work for a non-programmer to learn and implement.  This is a
tremendous investment for a social sciences graduate student (I could have
learned a lot of stats or formal theory with that much work) and something
I would estimate that few professors could afford.

Until something like MAML is ready for primetime, I think documented short
sample code can be one of the best teaching tools.  Marcus has created a
number of these over time and Paul has put some of them together.  But
short bits of working code can often illustrate solutions to problems in
ways that other resources cannot.  And, if they are explained... their
value increases exponentially...

Some of my next ambitions include importing empirical data into my model,
automating the collection of statistics and results, and toying with
genetic algorithms.  R, HDF5, and LISP are all acronyms suggesting that
I'll need to expend a lot of energy to get the results I seek, and the
prospect of learning additional software/interfaces is just not exciting me.



        Darren

_____________________________________________

                 Darren Schreiber
                  Attorney at Law
                 Graduate Student
             Political Science, UCLA
                address@hidden
        http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~dschreib


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