Documentation Set for Swarm 2.2
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# Chapter 3. Mag 3x: Swarm Structures

Swarm applications are structured around the concept of the Swarm. Swarms are the basic building blocks of Swarm simulations: a Swarm is a combination of a collection of objects and a schedule of activity over those objects. The collection are like the matter of the Swarm and the schedule is like the arrow of time moving the objects forward.

# 3.1. Model Swarms

In our current demos, Swarm applications contain two swarms. At the core is the model swarm, the Swarm that encapsulates the simulated model. Everything in the model swarm corresponds to objects in the world being modeled. For instance, in Heatbugs the HeatbugModelSwarm contains a collection of Heatbug agents, a HeatSpace to represent a physical property of the world, antion of Heatbug agents, a HeatSpace to represent a physical property of the world, and a Grid2d to store agent position.

In addition to the object collection, the model swarm also contains a schedule of activity on the model. The schedule defines the effect of passing time on the model. For the simple heatbugs schedule, the execution is simply to update the HeatSpace (diffusing heat across the world) and then telling each Heatbug agent to move itself.

Model swarms consist of a set of inputs and outputs. The inputs to the HeatbugModelSwarm are model parameters: things like the size of the world, the number of HeatBugs, and the diffusion rate of heat. The outputs of the HeatbugModelSwarm are the observables of the model: the individual Heatbugs, the distribution of heat across the world, etc.

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