StarLogo 2.2 review

StarLogo is a programmable modeling environment for exploring the workings of decentralized systems -- systems that are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator.

License: Freeware OS: Mac OS X File size: 9359K Developer: Lifelong Kindergarten Group -- MIT Media Lab Price: $0.00 Updated: 05 May 2006

0

StarLogo is a programmable modeling environment for exploring the workings of decentralized systems -- systems that are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. With StarLogo, you can model (and gain insights into) many real-life phenomena, such as bird flocks, traffic jams, ant colonies, and market economies.
In decentralized systems, orderly patterns can arise without centralized control. Increasingly, researchers are choosing decentralized models for the organizations and technologies that they construct in the world, and for the theories that they construct about the world.
But many people continue to resist these ideas, assuming centralized control where none exists -- for example, assuming (incorrectly) that bird flocks have leaders. StarLogo is designed to help students (as well as researchers) develop new ways of thinking about and understanding decentralized systems.

StarLogo is a specialized version of the Logo programming language. With traditional versions of Logo, you can create drawings and animations by giving commands to graphic "turtles" on the computer screen. StarLogo extends this idea by allowing you to control thousands of graphic turtles in parallel.
In addition, StarLogo makes the turtles' world computationally active: you can write programs for thousands of "patches" that make up the turtles' environment.

Turtles and patches can interact with one another -- for example, you can program the turtles to "sniff" around the world, and change their behaviors based on what they sense in the patches below. StarLogo is particularly well-suited for Artificial Life projects.

What's New:
Rewrote tail recursion detection to actually work.
Fixed numerous hanging bugs that plagued the MacOSX version of StarLogo.
Fixed display of error dialog boxes when running StarLogo as an applet.
StarLogo is properly ported to running on Intel-based Macintosh computers when they come out.
Eliminated ugly redraws of widgets on the Macintosh version of StarLogo. Text widgets look much better now.
Fixed a bug in scatter plots where the generated StarLogo code was wrong.
Found and fixed a bug that sometimes let the turtles escape their StarLogo world and scribble on the widgets nearby.
Resize the patch canvas back to default values when you do New Project.
Fixed numerous bugs in documentation.

Requirements:
Java 1.4 or later.