*LOGO: MASSIVE PARALLELISM FOR THE MASSES
*Logo, the first massively-parallel programming language designed
especially for nonexpert programmers, is now available for the
Connection Machine (model CM2).
With *Logo (pronounced starlogo), even people with limited programming
experience can create and experiment with massively-parallel
simulations. *Logo is particularly well-suited for "artificial life"
simulations, since it is easy to use *Logo to program thousands of
"artificial creatures." For example, you can write programs for
thousands of individual "ants," then observe the colony-level
behaviors that emerge from the interactions.
Many other types of simulations are also possible. *Logo has already
been used to simulate the interaction of cars in a traffic jam, the
interaction of atomic particles in a fission reaction, and the
interaction of buyers and sellers in an economic market.
*Logo is an extension of the popular Logo programming language, which
is now used in about one-third of all elementary schools in the United
States. Many students learn Logo programming through "turtle graphics"
-- they create drawings by giving commands to a graphic "turtle" on
the computer screen.
*Logo extends this idea by allowing you to control thousands of
graphic turtles at once. In addition, *Logo makes the turtles' world
computationally active, so that you can write programs not just for
thousands of turtles, but also for the thousands of "patches" that
make up the turtles' environment.
You can use the *Logo turtles in several ways. As in traditional
versions of Logo, you can use the turtles to draw on the screen. But
there is also a new form of turtle graphics: You can create graphics
out of the turtle themselves. For example, you can arrange hundreds of
turtles into a circle -- and then tell the turtles to move so that the
circle shrinks or expands. More significantly, you can treat the
turtles not as "graphic turtles" but as "behavioral turtles." For
example, you can make the turtles "sniff" around the world, and change
their behaviors based on what they sense.
*Logo (including documentation and sample programs) is available by
anonymous ftp from Thinking Machines. Just do the following:
ftp think.com
Name: anonymous
Password: <your login name>
cd /public/cm/starlogo
get starlogo.tar
get STARLOGO-install.txt
quit
Read the file STARLOGO-install.txt for further instructions.
*Logo was designed and implemented by Mitchel Resnick of MIT, with
help from Ryan Evans (of MIT) and JP Massar and Mario Bourgoin (of
Thinking Machines). Students from Boston-area high schools used *Logo
(and provided useful feedback) during the development process. Work on
*Logo has been supported by the MIT Media Laboratory, Thinking
Machines Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the LEGO Group,
the McArthur Foundation, and Nintendo Japan.