FW: [netlogo-users] Exercises for beginners: summary

[Stephen Guerin]

Nigel Gilbert posted this summary of exercises for ABM students on the NetLogo
list. Some good ideas.

-Steve

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nigel Gilbert [mailto:n.gilbert at surrey.ac.uk]
> Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2007 3:11 PM
> To: netlogo-users at yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [netlogo-users] Exercises for beginners: summary
>
> On 7 April, I asked for suggestions for programming exercises
> for those new to NetLogo or to programming. Many members of
> the list kindly volunteered ideas and advice. I summarise
> briefly below some of these (the original post is appended).
>
> Several people suggested that the best advice is to look at
> and modify existing programs, such as those in the Model
> Library. I agree that this is good advice, but I don't think
> it is sufficient: at some stage, beginners need to be
> persuaded to strike out on their own if they are become modellers.
>
> Ken Kahn suggested examples from Brian Harvey's Computer
> Science Logo Style
> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v2-toc2.html 
> <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v2-toc2.html>
>
> James Steiner suggested a 'chase and trace' program:
> Three (or more) things (the pursuers), starting (in the
> corners) pursue another thing (the pursued), starting (in the
> center). For each step the pursued takes (along a predefined
> path, a random path, away from closest chaser, away from all
> the pursuers), the pursuers take a step towards the pursued.
> As the things move, they drag a pen that shows the path they
> have taken.
>
> He also proposed implementing "Conway's Life".
>
> Paul Coates suggested a novel way of implementing bubblesort:
> When introducing bubblesort my students and I get lots of fun
> doing it with people. Students line up and each one asks the
> person in front what their name is. if you are Adamatzy and
> the guy in front is Zogolovich then you swap and so on. You
> could set this up with turtles using who numbers [or give the
> turtles names - NG]. Line the turtles up, ask them who the
> guy in front is etc.
>
> Jim Lyons suggested: Make a binary counter by using a turtle
> for each bit.
> Its label is its state, 1 or 0. (Hint: Arrange the turtles
> from right to left so that each turtle's who number is also
> its power of two in the
> counter.) Write a command that increments the counter by one.
>
> Steve Railsback mentioned the sequence of 16 template models
> he and colleagues devised that could be used as beginners' exercises:
> http://www.swarm.org/wiki/Software_templates 
> <http://www.swarm.org/wiki/Software_templates>
>
> Thank you all for your suggestions and interest. Here are
> some more suggestions that I have listed on a student handout:
>
> Cars at a road intersection
> What happens as the number of cars trying to cross an
> intersection increases? Develop a model in which cars/car
> drivers are agents and drivers attempt to cross the
> intersection safely, without crashing into the cars coming
> from the other roads that meet at the intersection.
>
> Patient choice
> An earlier activity introduced a system dynamics model of
> hospital choice (this modelled two hospitals, each with a
> maximum capacity, a waiting list, and a reputation. Patients
> selected which hospital to attend depending on its reputation
> and the length of its waiting list.
> Over-subscribed hospitals gradually lost their reputation as
> their quality of care declined). Build the equivalent
> agent-based model and see whether this is to be preferred
> over the system dynamics version.
>
> Party voting
> Assume that political parties? manifestos can be arranged
> along a single line, from left to right, that voters?
> preferences are randomly distributed from left to right, and
> that voters vote for the party whose manifesto position is
> closest to their own preference. Build a model to show that a
> centrist party will win the election. Now complicate the
> model with more than one dimension, parties that move their
> position to maximise their chances of election, voters that
> remember election pledges and so on (there is a large
> literature in political science investigating models of this kind).
>
> Seating positions
> In a typical lecture room, there are 5 rows of 6 seats.
> Students enter the room before a lecture starts and select a
> seat to occupy.
> Through observation, introspection or in some other way,
> devise a set of rules that students might be using to choose
> where to sit and create a simulation in which the agents use
> these rules to select a place in a virtual room. Compare the
> pattern of occupied seats with a real lecture room.
>
> Markets
> A market consists of some number of sellers and some buyers.
> Sellers want to maximise the money they receive, and will not
> sell if offered less than their ?reservation price?. However,
> they want to sell all their goods if possible. Buyers want to
> buy goods cheaply, and will not buy if the price is above
> their reservation price. Model a market in which there are no
> fixed prices, and the effective price depends on whether a
> buyer can be found for that price. Show that the price of a
> single type of good tends to converge to the ?market price?,
> and that this depends on the demand (but not on the number of
> buyers or sellers, if the numbers are large). Once you have
> designed a market model such as this, there are lots of
> interesting variations. For example, there may be information
> costs involved in finding which of several sellers is the
> cheapest. In such markets, not all sellers need to offer the
> same price.
>
>
> There are also two suggestions in my original post, below.
>
> Nigel
>
> On 7/4/07 23:06, "Nigel Gilbert" <n.gilbert at surrey.ac.uk
> <mailto:n.gilbert%40surrey.ac.uk> > wrote:
>
> > I'm looking for ideas for programs that beginners to NetLogo (and to
> > programming) could use as exercises to help them learn how to build
> > NetLogo models. Beginners can learn a lot from looking at other
> > people's programs, but to really gain confidence, they need to
> > practice writing their own. Most of the models in the
> Models Library
> > and on the Community page are good for learning about physics or
> > biology or whatever, but are too complicated for a real
> beginner to re-implement for themselves.
> >
> > Good exercises for beginners would be ones for which:
> > - it is easy to describe what the problem is or the model
> is supposed
> > to do;
> > - specialist knowledge of a discipline is not needed to
> understand the
> > problem
> > - a model can be programmed in less than one page (say, 40 lines of
> > code as a maximum)
> > - has some satisfyingly visual output
> >
> > Here's two suggestions. Do you have others to add? If so,
> please post
> > them (on or off list) and I'll summarise everything I get.
> >
> > 1. make a turtle trace out your initials 2. model the path
> of a rope
> > held at one end and moved with a sin wave at the other end
> >
> > Nigel
> >
> >
> > __________________________________________________________
> > Professor Nigel Gilbert, Editor, Journal of Artificial
> Societies and
> > Social Simulation, <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/ 
> > <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/> > Centre for Research in Social
> > Simulation (CRESS) Department of Sociology, University of
> Surrey, Guildford, UK.
> > Tel:[phone] N.Gilbert at surrey.ac.uk
> > <mailto:N.Gilbert%40surrey.ac.uk> <http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/ 
> > <http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
>
> __________________________________________________________
> Professor Nigel Gilbert, ScD, FREng, AcSS, Professor of
> Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UK. +44
> (0)1483 689173
>
>
>
> __._,_.___
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[Parks, Raymond]

Stephen Guerin wrote:
> Nigel Gilbert posted this summary of exercises for ABM students on the
> NetLogo
> list. Some good ideas.
...
>  > Paul Coates suggested a novel way of implementing bubblesort:
>  > When introducing bubblesort my students and I get lots of fun
>  > doing it with people. Students line up and each one asks the
>  > person in front what their name is. if you are Adamatzy and
>  > the guy in front is Zogolovich then you swap and so on. You
>  > could set this up with turtles using who numbers [or give the
>  > turtles names - NG]. Line the turtles up, ask them who the
>  > guy in front is etc.

   I just got around to reading this email.  Ray's Random Connections
worked again - as I read the paragraph, above, I thought of the story I
heard on Living On Earth this morning - http://www.greatturtlerace.com/.

--
Ray Parks                   rcparks at sandia.gov
IDART Project Lead          Voice:505-844-4024
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