Some folks from Hampshire College have created this beautiful simulation environment called breve. It provides an interpreted, object-oriented language made for writing agent/swarm-based simulations, a physics model that can detect collisions, an OpenGL-driven 3D display of the agents, and mouse and keyboard interaction with the simulation as it's running.
Their demos provide some nice examples of things learning to walk, boids (warning: Java applet) flocking, and pretty graphical effects that you can achieve with their language (which seems to be called "steve").
breve is available for Mac OS X and Linux.
Posted by Andrew Fiore at June 20, 2003 10:00 AMWell, I suppose if you can have a text editor named "ed", then you can have a language named "steve".
Other modelling tools include:
Indigo, the information growth and diffusion simulator. Jointly sponsord by Harvard Biz School and UMichigan's School of Information.
URL: http://www.indigosim.org/
Repast, a java-based software framework from UChicago. URL: http://repast.sourceforge.net/
Posted by: Scott Golder at June 24, 2003 09:22 AM