GarlicSim talk, Ram Rachum (cool-RR)
About
Pythonic Platform for computer simulations
important for research
fun
developed solely by Ram
Case study
Conway's Game of Life
nice case of feedback loop
recently researches found a creature that disintegrates & creates itself somewhere else
Why
need
scientists explores the world
creates a model, hypothises rules
simulations show a world governed by the model
then scientists can compare the model results with the real world
& if it works, you can test things not possible to experiment in the real world
Turning a model into a simulation
is difficult
easy to do something q&d, but difficult to change & extend
That's why you need a framework
to do it faster
Framework
need to find what's common to all simulations
life
physics
stock market
Suggested abstraction
every simulation has, World state, state of things in the modelled world, Step function, takes a state & changes it to the next step in time, based on the rules of the model
Once you have these, you can start playing the simulation
GUI
called
garlicsim_wx
completely optional
you can just, import garlicsim
you can run graphical simulation with your simpack, & you can also create a wx extension just to make it nicer
contains
board view, presents the world state
seek bar, timeline, yellow area was calculated, you can jump to points already calculated
tree browser, "time tree", generalization of timeline, supports forking, usage, use case 1, how could things have happened differently?, relevant only to non-deterministic simulations, use case 2, how could things have happened differently had the model laws were different?, giving different arguments to the step function, use case 3, what would happen if I make changes in the simulation world?, how, either, fork by crunching, runs the sim few more times from a given state, modify a state & see how the simulation evolves from there, main value of GarlicSim
playback controls
python shell, explore, extend & interact with the model
entities
simpack
simulation package, type of simulation, has the code for, world state, state function
project
data of a simulation
architecture
SimpackGrokker
manages the simpack, getting the state, getting the step function
CrunchingManager
creates a cruncher to run step functions
several cruncher types, there are currently, Thread cruncher, Process cruncher, would love to use, PiCloud
examples
queue
prisoner dilema
evolutionary using a population of players
3 strategies, angel, asshole, smarty
you set the initial distribution of strategies among the population, evetually the assholes get almost extincted, & then the angels grow back a bit
very cool..
packages
garlicsim
engine, LGPL licensed
garlicsim_lib
collection of simpacks, LGPL licensed
garlicsim_wx
not yet OSS
getting started
easy_install
or download installer
video intro & tutorials in the web site
garlicsim.org
