From: Dave Thomas <Dave@...>
Date: 2001-07-20T13:00:53+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:18168] Re: Looking for Ruby programming  exercises

"James (ruby-talk)" <ruby@jamesbritt.com> writes:

> Do you mean like a cellular automata, except the 'cells' are
> plugable objects?

Chris Moline <ugly-daemon@home.com> writes:

> Ok could you be a bit more specific? Like what do you mean by discrete event and
> what is the system supposed to do??

Have a look at

  http://www.nmsr.labmed.umn.edu/~michael/des.html

There are many other google references.


A classic DES is a queuing simulation (say a bank). Is it better to
have one line which all the tellers draw from, or a line per teller?
Better in terms of overall throughput? Better in terms of median wait
time? etc. These are questions you can answer with simulations.

You can use them for problems that are closer to home, simulating
disk-head scheduling algorithms, scheduling algorithms, communications
buffers and the like.

And they're just plain fun to play with. Complex behaviors can emerge
from simple rules (just like with the swarm stuff, but in a different
way).



Dave