Bill Clementson's Blog

Summmary of lispvan February 2006 meeting: PLT Scheme Simulation Collection

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Well, we "took over" the Think! cafe again with 15 people attending Doug Williams' presentation of his PLT Scheme Simulation Collection to the February lispvan meeting.

Doug brought along copies of his presentation and the documentation for his Science and Simulation collections so that people could walk through some of the examples as he was presenting. His Simulation collection is an impressive effort and I am looking forward to the 3rd part of his trilogy (the Inference collection) that he is planning to release later this year.

Luckily, for those of you who are "geographically challenged" and couldn't make it to the meeting, we have a number of options that will allow you to experience our lispvan meeting in absentia:

• Movie: I did a screen capture movie of Doug's presentation, so you will be able to view and hear the entire meeting (less the pre-meeting setup stuff and the post-meeting rowdy boozy chatter ;-). (The 145MB .mov file is here)
• Presentation: A copy of the presentation (in both .ppt and .pdf formats)
• Documentation: A copy of the Science collection documentation (in .pdf format) and the Simulation collection documentation (in .pdf format)
• Workshop Instructions: If you want to run through the examples on your own, do the following:
  1. Download & install DrScheme from here
  2. Run DrScheme and change the Language level to" PLT/Pretty Big" by selecting the menu option "Language/Choose Language..."
  3. Download & install the Science and Simulation collection from the PLaneT Package Repository by entering the following statement in the DrScheme REPL:

     (require (planet "simulation-with-graphics.ss" ("williams" "simulation.plt" 1 0)))

  4. Run the example programs in the examples directory (on my Mac, they were installed in "~/Library/PLT Scheme/planet/300/301/cache/williams/simulation.plt/1/0/examples") either by following along with the presentation or by reading the documentation
• More info: If you like the Simulation collection but want more information on the Science collection (the first module of the 3-part collection - which wasn't really discussed in any detail in this presentation), you can view the earlier presentation Doug gave in 2004 (there is a movie and pdf available of that presentation).