Re: RePast (another agent toolkit) released

[Miles Parker]

Hey Nick,

Very nice job..I had no idea you were even working on this. (I just moved to an 
iteration model as well, though I've been avoiding the collections library for 
the core 'cause I want to stay 1.1.x compatible as long as most browsers are 
compatible w/ it. I'm really anxious to get into the 2D API, but have been 
avoiding it for the same reason.) I think the community needed a more 
traditional swarm like all java solution--I've been a little surprised that 
swarm hasn't been more anxious to provide it, though I can totally understand 
their choices given limited resources. Let me know how things go..perhaps we'll 
find things we can collaborate on.

best regards,

Miles




Miles T. Parker
Software Engineer
The Brookings Institution  1775 Mass. Ave. NW  Washington, DC  20036
http://www.brook.edu/es/dynamics/models/ascape
mailto:address@hidden  voice 202.797.6136  fax 202.797.6319

>>> Nick Collier <address@hidden> 01/26/00 02:02PM >>>
We've just released RePast, a Swarm-like simulation toolkit. Details
below.

Social Science Research Computing at the University of Chicago has
released version 1.0 of RePast, an agent based simulation toolkit,
developed under a BSD license. RePast is a software framework for
creating agent based simulations using Java (requires version Java 1.2
or greater). It provides a library of classes for creating, running,
displaying and collecting data from an agent based simulation. In
addition, RePast can take snapshots of running simulations, and create
quicktime movies of simulations. RePast also provides facilities for
batch runs iterating through large parameter spaces. The design of
RePast borrows much from the Swarm toolkit design, especially in the
area of scheduling and would not have been possible without Swarm.

Repast is being released through SourceForge a popular Open Source
development site, and we'll be using SourceForge to manage the
development of RePast. We have our home page at
http://repast.sourceforge.net/ and the project page at
http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=1703 

In the next few days we'll be migrating the RePast CVS tree over to
SourceForge and both anonymous and non-anonymous CVS access will be
available through the project page.

Performance is comparable to both Swarm (faster than Java Swarm and a
bit slower the ObjC Swarm) and Ascape. One of the demonstration
simulations is a port of Heat Bugs and that can be used for a rough
performance estimate. RePast should become faster in later releases as
more performance tuning gets done. RePast has been run on WindowsNT/9*
and on Solaris 2.7. It will be tested on Linux in the next couple of
days.

For more information and to download the 1.0 release, see the RePast
homepage at http://repast.sourceforge.net RePast comes with javadoc API
documentation, a collection of "how tos" and five demonstration
simulations. In addition there are mailing lists for any interested
parties, see the home page for details.


Nick

-- 
Nick Collier
Social Science Research Computing
University of Chicago

address@hidden 


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                  ==================================
   Swarm-Modelling is for discussion of Simulation and Modelling techniques
   esp. using Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp. [un]subscribing),
   please send a message to <address@hidden> with "help" in the
   body of the message.
                  ==================================