

Article 49 of comp.lang.visual:
Path: mimsy!tank!ncar!husc6!bunny!sg04
>From: [email-masked] (Steven Gutfreund)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.visual
Subject: Re: what I'm working on...
Summary: ThinkerToy references
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 Oct 89 16:45:51 GMT
References: <[email-masked]> <[email-masked]> <[email-masked]>
Organization: GTE Laboratories, Waltham MA
Lines: 43

Craig Hubley asked for some references (unfortunately they are fewer than
they should be for a 400 page 100 diagram thesis, due to pre/post thesis
depression).

ManiplIcons in ThinkerToy, OOSPLA'87, pp 307-318, Sigplan Notices DEC 1987
(also to appear in a IEEE tutorial by Ephraim Glinert on Visual Programming
Languages).

ThinkerToy: an Enviroment for Decision Support, Univ of Mass, Amherst
MA, 1988 (available from University Microfilms Interantional Ann Arbor MI
800-521-0600) [Umass stopped issueing theses as tech reports without
heavy upfront money]

The work was a synthesis of ThingLab, Program by Rehesal (from PARC), and
Pygmallion.

I did use a graphical langauge to describe the mechanics of the operation
of the model and the spatial analysis tools one applied to the model. It
was a dataflow/visual Smalltalk (about 3Meg of Smalltalk-80 code). I
was not entirely happy with it, but it served several purposes: allowing
description of code, and providing an animated modeling tool for queueing
problems (barbershops, supermarkets, traffic, etc.).

Craig's suggestions about sensors for parsing and analysing physical
structures is interesting. However, it seems to me we are better at
parsing the static semantics of such things, and dynamics is much harder.

Also, I think we have to crawl before we run. I am starting with more
abstract spatial representations, charts, topological maps, dataflow
diagrams. 

My collegue, Rob Rubin, has done some interesting work on free-form drawing
of arbitrary graphs (FSM's, HyperGraphs, Petrie Nets) parsed them and
added semantic animation.

I think we have to crawl through these more artifical and abstract visual
representations before attempting to capture real-world models of
car, building, and other systems.
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Yechezkal Shimon Gutfreund		 		  [email-masked]
GTE Laboratories, Waltham MA			    harvard!bunny!sgutfreund
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