Clementson's Blog

 Bits and pieces (mostly Lisp-related) that I collect from the ether.

February 2006
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Vancouver Lisp Users Group meeting for February

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

This will be the first lispvan meeting of 2006 and it looks to be a good one! Doug Williams has been working on a "Knowledge-based Simulation Environment" in PLT Scheme for several years now. There are actually 3 separate components to his project, the first of which (the Science Collection) I saw him present back in 2004 (there is a movie and pdf available of that presentation). He has now completed the second component (the Simulation Collection) and I'm really keen to see his presentation on this one as I've already had a sneak preview of the slides and code! ;-)

In addition to the presentation, Doug will bring CD's with copies of Dr Scheme and his software so that people can try out things on their own laptops as he's presenting. He will also conduct a mini-workshop after the presentation which will be a more hands-on and interactive means of experiencing the code. So, be sure to bring your laptops!

Here's the "official" meeting notice:

Topic: PLT Scheme Simulation Collection
Presenter: Doug Williams
Date: Thursday, February 16, 2006
Time: 7pm - 10pm (or whenever)
Venue: Think!, 4512 West 10th Ave., Vancouver (see map)
Summary: I am attempting to recreate - and extend - in PLT Scheme the knowledge-based simulation environment I used to have in Symbolics Common Lisp. It consists of three PLT Scheme collections:

  1. Science Collection: The PLT Scheme Science Collection is a port of portions of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) and it provides a foundation of numerical routines for implementing the other collections, as well as providing data analysis functions. The PLT Scheme Science Collection Version 2.0, which includes ordinary differential equations, has been released via PLaneT.
  2. Simulation Collection: The PLT Scheme Simulation Collection provides a simulation engine for combined discrete (based on a process interaction model) and continuous simulation models. The PLT Scheme Simulation Collection Version 1.0 has been released via PLaneT.
  3. Inference Collection: The PLT Scheme Inference Collection provides a rule-based inference engine and is now under active development.
In this talk, I will present the PLT Scheme Simulation Collection. I will start with a simplified discrete-event simulation engine (less than three pages of documented Scheme code) to show how to build a continuation-based simulation engine. The functionality provided by the simulation collection will then be discussed. Examples and demonstrations will be used throughout the presentation. An informal, hands-on workshop will be included where we will go through installing and running PLT Scheme and the science and simulation collections. We will also go through developing and running simulation models. So bring your laptop. The topics are: This should be a terrific session! I plan to record the talk and make it available on my blog.

emacs Copyright © 2006 by Bill Clementson