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

[Robert]

Not caring about the electronics in a car (or source code) is fine, but you are
still responsible for your electronics working properly.  I was a police 
officer for
several years and when I was given excuses like "but my speedometer said...," 
(and
a  myriad of others...no wonder I became a modeler :-)  it usually prompted me 
into
the "the proper operation of your vehicle is your responsibility"  lecture.  In 
the
same way, the modeler or scientist is responsible for code they use, even if 
deeply
embedded in a package.  You may choose not to browse swarm code at some level 
and
trust that it was written satisfactorily for your particular needs...but you are
still responsible for the results.  Who of us wants to hear an explaination of 
an
error start with "but swarm was supposed to...."

The bottom line is that I also want to encourage nonprogrammers to use swarm, 
but
not if it means algorithmic ignorance.   Let's spare them the gory 
implementation
details (this is at least where I draw my personal "trust" line with swarm).  
But
let's not spare the understanding of the algorithms.  With every new level of
abstraction, we get farther from understanding what our models are really 
modeling.

Robert


Pietro Terna wrote:

>         sure, it is a car, but in my car I don't care about electronic 
> components
> and so on. Using Swarm I had to read the source code in a very few number
> of cases, mainly to cope with internal errors.
>
>         I agree that it is very useful to have the source, also to improve our
> ability in the art of programming. But if we want to have more and more
> social scientists using Swarm and agent based models, we have to facilitate
> their efforts.
>



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