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Programing languages help
    #9028139 -

I recently played the game Pandemic II and thought it was a great idea but the modelling of disease progression was shit.

I want to write my own realistic pandemic simulation. It won't be a game, just a program you give some starting conditions and it spews out a few graphics (e.g. world map in colours) and statistics as it runs.

I want to model each person and their chances of contracting and transmitting the virus over time, allowing for things like movement between regions, environment, chance of them passing on a mutated virus etc...

I guess this might get processor-intensive once I ramp up the number of people modelled.

What is the best language to do this in? I only have experience of BASIC (a long time ago) and PHP (which is totally not suitable). I don't know anything about other languages.


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jesus

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Re: Programing languages help [Re: Baeosistine]
    #9028173 -

I dont have much advice.  Right now I am modeling chemotaxis using FORTRAN, which people on here hate.  So they will tell you not to use it.  Whatever language handles arrays the best I guess.

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Re: Programing languages help [Re: Baeosistine]
    #9028518 -

Since you know PHP, I would recommend C or Java... Both are very close to PHP in structure.  JAVA will run slower because it is interpreted, but it will be easier to spit out graphics.  C will be faster, but you will have a harder time interfacing with the graphics environment.


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Just another spore in the wind.

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Re: Programing languages help [Re: Seuss]
    #9028546 -

Interesting - everyone I have spoken to who has programed in Java has said that a) it's not a pretty language to learn and use, and b) everything that can be done in Java can be done better some other way.

I don't mind learning something totally new, but I want to make sure I am learning the right thing before I start.


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jesus

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Re: Programing languages help [Re: Baeosistine]
    #9029042 -

For quick and dirty visualization, I find Java to be one of the easier to use.  However, as I said, it isn't a fast language and isn't something I would program a large project in (though obviously it can be done; see open office, azureus, etc as examples).  Microsofts .net (c# or whatever they call it) is basically a copy of java.  If you are on windows, that may be the better route to go.

I was trying to stick with language recommendations that are close to php, since you already know php, to keep your learning curve to a minimum.

> b) everything that can be done in Java can be done better some other way.

Hmmm... ask them what better way there is to write portable web applications that run on the client side.  Flash is the only thing that comes to mind that might come close.

You might also take a look a python.  Although I don't care for it myself, a lot of people love it and it is starting to mature with enough library support to be fairly useful.


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Just another spore in the wind.

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Re: Programing languages help [Re: Seuss]
    #9029485 -

Seuss said:
For quick and dirty visualization, I find Java to be one of the easier to use.


More specifically, check out processing which is a Domain Specific Language for visualizing data embedded in Java with an IDE that makes running and deploying visualizations extremely easy.  Java is horribly verbose and full of ENTERPRISE, so anything that gains you a little abstraction (and thus brevity and expressiveness) is certainly good (i.e. Processing).

The real issue, though, is that the language you use doesn't really matter, ultimately.  What matters is what you are experienced and comfortable with.  If you know PHP, you might try to do this using PHP to output webpages with processing.js (a javascript implementation of the Processing library) for the visualizations on a canvas.  If you wan to learn something new, Python is very easy to learn (compared to C, which will require you to know quite a lot of things that you haven't come into contact with in PHP) and has an excellent selection of visualization possibilities (such as pydot with graphviz).

Another point is that simulating every single person directly (and keeping a record of them) is not necessary and certainly will not scale very well if you intend to run a "world-wide" simulation including one of every person (and to do it properly you would also need to give each person a neural network to simulate some of their actions - this scales even less well).  It would scale much better (but require a bit more mathematics) if you represented this system as functions which could describe all the various people in a particular area and some functions to describe their movements.  Then, all you have to do is call these functions continuously until your simulation ends.  The advantage of this approach is that you can still represent EVERY single person, but you don't have to explicitly keep a record for EVERY single person.


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delta9

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Re: Programing languages help [Re: Baeosistine]
    #9029669 -

I was going to suggest Python but then I had another thought... wait for it... brace yourselves... Excel.


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I know... that just the smallest
                                                part of the world belongs to me
You know... I'm not a blind man
                                                    but truth is the hardest thing to see

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General Interest > Science and Technology
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