[HN Gopher] NovaStelo: Block-style programming for multi-agent s... ___________________________________________________________________ NovaStelo: Block-style programming for multi-agent systems, based on MIT Scratch Author : mpweiher Score : 58 points Date : 2020-05-10 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | gorgoiler wrote: | Scratch is rad. It's so productive. Modeling threads as sprites | -- a physical version of actors with <touch> being the most | common _message passing_ -- is such a liberating / accelerating | idea. | | It's also a bit too easy to get, ahem, emergent properties in | Scratch, but that's fine for one off playful hacking. Pong bats | that accelerate balls etc. | qwe098cube wrote: | I have read "multi-agent system" or "agent based programming" a | few times, but I have not yet understood what is meant by it. | pdexter wrote: | As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_model I believe | ww520 wrote: | It's basically programming an ant, or an ant prototype, with | some simple rules, and hoping the interaction among a swarm of | them will create some emergent behavior at the colony level. | thelazydogsback wrote: | This looks like cellular-automata and other reactive a-life -- | while I suppose you could stretch the def'n of multi-agent | systems to cover these, it's certainly not the first thing that | you'll find in the literature. Cool though. | | Smalltalk had some groundbreaking ideas -- but "an app. is an | image of the whole, monkey-patched class hierarchy shipped with | the entire system" certainly wasn't it's greatest contribution. | felixgallo wrote: | That "certainly" is a little funny to hear in the age of | docker images. | gowld wrote: | It just means running separate processes that communicate, like | the programs on your PC. | mthoms wrote: | This is a great explanation as to why modeling the behaviours | of each "agent" (a citizen in this case) is more realistic than | attempting to model the system (a city) as a whole. | | https://theconversation.com/how-big-data-and-the-sims-are-he... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-05-10 23:00 UTC)