CODEWITHSUNDEEP
apinetlogoexternalagent
Robert
Robert

Reputation: 11

Interfacing Netlogo with external agents

Can someone guide me as googling does not send me to the right places.

I want to adapt netlogo to include players real or simulated with other technologies. I need to interface the netlogo core (running an established game) and have the moves and choices determined by the external entities, which may be human or automania.

In searching for the API to allow this, I can find is the controlling API which is seems to be for running NetLogo muitiple runs of a model and not what I want.

And please before you close this again suggest how I can make this more focused as the problem is finding the starting point....

Can anyone assist.

Regards

Robert

Upvotes: 1

Views: 149

Answers (1)

Nicolas Payette
Nicolas Payette

Reputation: 14972

There are two main ways to interface between NetLogo and the "outside world":

Which one to use depends on what you're trying to achieve.

You say that you:

need to interface the netlogo core (running an established game) and have the moves and choices determined by the external entities, which may be human or automania.

That, to me, sounds very much like a job for the extensions API, which is what has been suggested to you on the netlogo-devel group. Extensions allow to add new "primitives" to NetLogo, and those primitives can be written in any language that runs on the JVM (Java, Scala, Clojure, etc.)

So if you have a game written in NetLogo and a bot written in some other language that the JVM can interface with (possibly by using the JNI), you could write a new NetLogo extension command that calls out to the bot (e.g., something like bot:play game-state). A game written in NetLogo could then use that command to let the bot play its turn.

If that is indeed what you want to do, then Jeremy has already given you a good starting point in his netlogo-devel answer, and there is not much we can add to this until you have more specific questions.

You also said, however, that you looked at using the controlling API, so maybe what you had in mind is to have a game written in some other language, and use a NetLogo model to generate the behaviour of a particular player in that game. The controlling API allows you to do that. (It's not just for running a model multiple times!) If you look at the examples in the controlling guide, you'll see that you can use the API to send commands to a NetLogo model and to report the results back to your external program. The only constraint is that this external program needs to be able to talk to the JVM.

If you don't think this answers you question, please try to give us a concrete example of a precise thing that you want to do but do not think can be achieve in one of these two ways. We might be able to help you better than.

Upvotes: 1

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