On Monday, June 2nd we had our third Denver Area Lisp Users Group
meeting. Alex Repenning and Andri Ioannidou gave a really interesting
presentation on AgentSheets - an agent-authoring & simulation-creation
tool written in Common Lisp (MCL). The intial development of the
product was done with MCL - they sell a Mac version based on MCL and
have an upcoming OSX version using the (newly released) version of
MCL. For their first Windows product, they converted the MCL product
to Java. Interestingly, they may release future Windows versions in
Lisp.
We saw demos of a number of different simulations that they had
created with the tool including a mud-slide simulation, a soccer
simulation (potential RoboCup entry??), a bridge stress test
simulation, a game of life simulation, a pac man simulation and a
virus simulation. In addition, they gave us an early peek at an
upcoming 3d OpenGL version of the product (written using the latest
version of MCL for OSX). The 3d simulations included a bus tracking
application that is being done for Boulder's RTD service (with PDA's
providing information on bus locations to commuters and the server
display overlaying 3d buses on a map of Boulder) and a distributed
human being simulation (with PDA's controlling different
characteristics of a human's anatomy) - this one was a lot of fun!
They have a web site with information on the product and links to info
on a lot of the existing simulations at: http://agentsheets.com/
Info on Mr. Vetro, the human being simulation can be found at
http://www.agentsheets.com/about_us/documents/C5%20Flier.pdf
Info on the bus tracking application can be found at
http://www.agentsheets.com/about_us/documents/Mobility%20Agents%20Flier.pdf
In addition to enjoying the AgentSheets presentation (and in keeping
with lisp user group tradition), the group consumed Mexican food and
alcoholic beverages and had some interesting conversations on XML
parsers for lisp and the upcoming ILC-2003 conference.
--
Bill Clementson