From: "Nicholas Travers" <travers.nicholas@gmail.com>
Date: June 7, 2008 9:52:00 AM PDT
To: chaos@cse.ucdavis.edu, brown@cse.ucdavis.edu
Subject: Final Project

Here is my final project. I've changed the code a bit from when I gave the presentation to make the flocking behavior look a bit more like flocking birds and a bit less like swarming insects. The movement is quite a bit smoother and less jittery now, although still by no means  fully natural. 

There are many programs involved in the project that use each other so I've summarized them and their uses here. For details on how to run them see the comments at the start of each program. Many of them require arguments and must be run something like " run FlockingAnalysis.py filename timestep ".

The simulation programs can also take quite a while to run, which is why I wrote the data to textfile to read back more quickly for animation purposes. For this reason I've also saved several textfiles with good pregenerated data to my public_html folder so you can see what things look like without having to run a whole bunch of simulations.  If you can't access them let me know and I can bring them in on a memory stick (they were too large to send over e-mail).  

*** THE PROGRAMS ***

(1) Base Programs which are not used directly, but are only called by other programs.

FlockingClassDefinitions.py
FlockUpdateRules2.py 
FlockingGetPositions.py


(2) Simulation Programs - used to simulate the movement of the flock and write the data (a timeseries of positions) to a textfile.

FlockingSimulator2.py                        
FlockingSimulatorDivergence2.py


(3) Display Programs - used to read back data from a textfile and create an animation of the flock movement.

FlockingDisplayObstacles.py
FlockingDisplayDivergence.py 


(4)  Analysis programs  - used to read back data from a textfile and create various plots

FlockingAnalysis.py
FlockingAnalyzeDivergence.py 



*** THE DATA FILES ***


(1) Basic Simulations (view with FlockingDisplayObstacles.py)

filename     Obstacle_filename
data1         NoObstacles
data2         NoObstacles
data3         NoObstacles

(2) Obstacle Simulations (view with FlockingDisplayObstacles.py)

filename                  Obstacle_filename
obstacle_data1         obstacles1
obstacle_data2         obstacles2
obstacle_data3         obstacles3

(3) Divergence Simulations (view with FlockDisplayDivergence.py)

filename
divergence_data1 
divergence_data2

** These also contain associated files divergence_data1copy and divergencedata2copy with information about the dual flock but they should be run using the filenames given above. ** 


     - Nick