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July 2009

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Subject:
From:
"t.n.a." <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
MASON Multiagent Simulation Toolkit <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 4 Jul 2009 16:00:04 +0200
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Sean Luke wrote:
> Tomislav, MASON doesn't have a built-in probability distribution
> event scheduler.  It's a bit more low-level than that but if you
> think it'd be useful we should probably add something in.

Thanks for the prompt answer, Sean.
I will attempt to use existing libraries then, and will see how that goes.

> If you want to hack your own, MASON lets you schedule events for
> any particular time in the future, so you could generate a random
> number, transformed to the appropriate distribution, and then
> schedule using that value as a time.

I'm not sure how I would go about transforming uniform distribution
random numbers to a specific distribution...I could do it for simple,
streight-lined artificial distributions, but for distributions like
gamma, it'd turn into a project of it's own...

> I'd be interested in adding this in but am presently out of the
> country, so it will have to wait for a week or two.

Thinking about it, it seems to me that it would be good enough to
track down one or two good libraries supporting a wide variety of
probability distributions and do the following:
- package them together with mason if the licences are compatible and/or
- update the mason documentation so that it links heavily to the
selected libraries and explains how to use them

This would have the following benefits:
- is relatively easy to do
- would make it clear to mason users that this is the recommended way
to generate random values according to a specific distribution
- would spare users the burden of having to search for good libraries
themselves

To that effect, when I'm done with my project, I can provide a short
summary about my experiences and you might be able to use that for a
start.

Cheers,
Tomislav

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