Swarm is a software package for multi-agent simulation of complex
systems being developed at the Santa Fe Institute. Swarm is intended
to be a useful tool for researchers in a variety of disciplines. The
basic architecture of Swarm is the simulation of collections of
concurrently interacting agents: with this architecture, we can
implement a large variety of agent based models (ABM).
The talk is intended to be an introductory one, in which the focus
will be on the published research results obtained from the use of
Swarm in four different scientific contexts to date. This enables us
to introduce the Swarm notion of an 'agent', and discuss how Swarm
attempts to build a language 'bridge' from a number of agent-based
problem domains, to the domain of the computational implementation.
Each of these four models uses Swarm 'agents' as the primary modelling
entities, and can be considered as members in a nested hierarchy:
