Paths Ahead - Wants vs. Needs

Happy Fourth.

The ten thousand segment simulation ran to completion, but I couldn't tell what the results were. I had been displaying all of the ribbon points to the console, and then copying them into a txt file so I could import them into Excel, but overflowed the console. I should have anticipated that, but wasn't thinking ahead. I added a method to directly dump the ribbon to a file, and now only display the first twenty and last twenty ribbon points.

I re-ran the model last night for ten thousand segments, simulating eight days of time. It takes about two minutes wall clock for every hour of simulated time on my laptop with that number of segments (the model is a O(N)). It finished at about 12:35 this morning. I had Julie wake me up at 12:30, so I could fire off another simulation before I went back to sleep. I am currently running a two thousand segment ribbon for eighty days time.

There are a couple of improvements that I can make to the simulation to make running it a little easier. One will be to be able to read in a ribbon from a file, so I can extend the duration of the simulations by picking up where I left off. This would also allow me to interrupt a simulation. My goal is to run some really big simulations over night.

Another improvement will be to add a scheduler, so I can queue up simulations, and run the next one as soon as the first one completes.

I still need to add the climbers back into the model, as well as add a display capability that I can turn on and off. My daughter Stephanie wants to see the graphics first.