Hello everyone and welcome to the 2017 edition of the introduction to agent-based modelling.
If you are watching the videos in order of the videos you just watch what was the introduction I recorded last year.
And the videos that are going to be seen throughout this course are kind of an amalgamation of ones I did last year and ones we are doing this year.
We are always trying to update, refresh the course, get new content in there, make it better, greater, faster, right?
And so we are going to do our best to put the content up there.
Now, there is a major change that has occurred I need to talk about a little bit which is that NetLogo, which is the software we are going to use consistently throughout the course, has had a new, major revision to it.
And so the new version is NetLogo 6. The version we used last year was NetLogo 5.3.
And as a result there are some differences between the two.
However, in preparation for the relaunch of this course I have extensively played around with both of them, and a lot of differences are just look and feel differences.
They are just that the appearance is different, but usually for what we are doing, for that kinds of work we are doing throughout the course they essentially behave in very similar ways.
And so I don't anticipate there being too many problems.
There being said: I am going to spend some time afterwards, don't talking to you right now, to go through an examination of the two side by side, to, kind of, get you some idea of what the differences are between the two setups.
Now, there are some great changes that they made in NetLogo, that we are going to talk about later on in the course.
And we are going to do a couple of videos on them. About some new features and capabilities that really make NetLogo a more powerfull tool for agent-based modeling.
But for the vast majority of material we cover in this course that is not an important aspect of it.
And so you are going to be able to switch back and forth between NetLogo 5.3 and 6 [if is] whenever you want.
That said, I highly recommend you try to choose one and stick with it throughout the course, rather than trying to switch back and forth.
And, in fact, I recommend you to choose NetLogo 6, right?
That is the newest and greatest and it will give you the ability to just move up from now right along the way.
In fact, [if] any of the new videos I am going to be doing, will be in NetLogo 6. Even though some of the older videos are in NetLogo 5.3.
Because I want to make sure that we are using always the most update content and material.
So I don't expect any problems, but if there are please write questions on the forum, tweet us and email us, whatever.
And we will definitely address this. Maybe with additional videos, or advice videos, etc., in order to make sure that we have updated them appropriately. Right?
So, let me know if you have any concerns along those lines.
And in just a second you will hear my voice again as I am talking over the side-by-side comparison between [the two software packages,] the two versions of the software.
Ok, so as promised, here you can see the two different versions of NetLogo side-by-side.
On the left, where my cursor is moving now, you see NetLogo 5.3.
And on the right you see NetLogo 6.
And right off the back you will notice that there are some changes.
They are mainly due to the way the graphical libraries that NetLogo is now using in order to present its results.
It will be more consistent, more up to speed.
So, there are a couple of things that are not exactly the same. A lot of it is just the look.
But, for instance, you will notice that this little title bar across what is called the world is no longer there in the new version.
But all the features you want to get to can still be found by right clicking and then going down to add it.
And it will show up all the features that exist there, right?
Those are the same things you can access through here.
In fact, you could do that even in the old NetLogo. You can go down to [inspect, no sorry] edit and it will show up right away.
In fact, in many ways it is a good change. These buttons caused people problems in the past.
They accidentially clicked them and it, kind of, clears the world and people did not like that.
By the way, a lot of these comments are not going to make a lot of sense to you right now, it is too early in the course.
But I highly recommend coming back to this later on when we are actually gone through some time to build your model and do all that kind of things.
However, the most important thing is that the models still run the same way.
You can hit 'setup' and you can hit 'go' and you can hit 'setup' and you can hit 'go'.
And, as you can see, the models look very similar to each other with very few differences in terms of the results.
I so am not into expecting any problems in the near future.
When we get into the coding section we may run into some things but we will work through those as we get to them.
So, the 'interface' tab looks very similar still. The 'ticks' counter, by the way, has moved: it used to be on the titlebar; since there is no title bar it is now up here by the speed counter.
Small difference. But other than that there is not a lot.
There is also something called the 'info' tab in NetLogo models which lists all the different content that describes the model.
That, essentially, has remained unchanged from NetLogo 5.3 to NetLogo 6.
And then there is the 'code' tab. And the 'code' tab has gone through some significant improvements I would say actually.
NetLogo [is always trying, has its] is a unique programming language and has its own, build in, what we call integrated development environment.
And they have always trying to improve it over time. And so there is a couple of big features that have been added as NetLogo 6.
For instance, you know, you can see that there is a lot of code here. And let's say, I just don't want to look at some of this code.
I can now, kind of, minimise it, in order to just show me the procedure name instead.
And then I can click on it to bring it back.
There is also the ability now that you autocomplete, which is really helpful, like if you can't remember the name of...
Let's say, you are working on the code right here and you can't remember the name of the 'clear all' command, which should be pretty obvious, you can type 'clear' and it will bring up all the commands in NetLogo starting with 'clear', so I can select 'clear-all' and autocomplete the function.
One other small change that might be useful is that you can now go to any variable that you see, like 'food-source-number' and figure out where it actually was defined in the code by just going down to 'Jump To Declaration'.
That is, kind of, a nice little way to just see what does define[?] that particular [function] variable.
And that is one that maybe you can use when we are writing our code.
There is a bunch of other changes that I can't quickly show you right now, but we will talk about it [in later courses] later parts of the course.
For instance, we are going to talk about something called a 'task' at one point. And tasks could now become what was known as 'anonymous procedure'. It is a technical term but it makes it a lot easier to use them, essentially.
Another thing that has come about [is], and part of the biggest change in NetLogo 6, is there is now something called 'level space'.
And level space is a really cool tool that allows one NetLogo model to control another NetLogo model.
And I am going to talk about that in a separate video later on the course.
Now the thing is that later in the course, towards the end of the course, we use a tool called 'behaviour search' that used to be a separate download.
It is now part of the NetLogo package, making it a lot easier to use.
And, of course, there has been some fantastic bug fixes. They fixed a lot of problems in NetLogo. Right?
So, NetLogo 6 is great, as you could see just looking at it. Very similar to NetLogo 5.3, so I don't anticipate having many problems with those in terms of switching back and forth.
But if you do run into any complications or concerns, please let me know.
Thanks! And I hope you enjoy the course.