Courses/CS 461/Winter 2006/Firouz Bharthania/week1

From CSWiki

At the beginning the NetLogo language seemed having a strange syntax, but as the time went on I find it more and more interesting. Somehow it is different from the traditional procedural languages like C or Java. I think it's designers have tried to make it as similar to natural language as possible, and to some extend they have succeeded.

Also splitting the whole environment into three kinds of agents (Patches, Turtles and Observers) as well as providing those components like slider or plot makes it much easier to prototype a model compared to primitive frameworks like Java.

There are two very important factor of performance and extensibility that has to be studied about this platform before using it for serious projects.

Some other nice features (some of them have been added recently) are:

• Extensions:The capability to add extensions(commands and reporters) which are written in Java.
  
• BehaviorSpace:The tool which runs the model many times with different configurations so one can study the changes in the system result as the parameters change.
• HubNet:The tool which enables the human agent to control and act in the NetLogo environment.
• GoGo:A simple electronic circuit which becomes the interface between the NetLogo and the world outside (e.g. sensors, motors and ...).
• SystemDynamics:A different viewpoint in modeling the system compared to agent based viewpoint. It lets you define the effect of the different parts of the system on each other without defining the behavior of each agent or the detailed reaction logic between them. One of the nice examples for this part is the "Wolf Sheep Predation" model.

After all they have done a great job in java programming !!!

Here it is a version of Sand Pile program I implemented in NetLogo platform. Sand Pile