Re: [Repast-developer] interesting copy question

[Skye Bender-d. <sky...@sa...>]

The way I've been doing it is to assume that people are either working
with multiplex networks, or they arn't (hows that for logic!). So, for
ex., all of the generation classes are either designed so that they will
not create duplicate ties, or (I belive random net does this) you must
explicity allow the possiblity of duplicate ties and self-loops.  Many
network statistics not meaningful if duplicate ties are allowed, but
there are definitly some models where that is the way to go.  So Density
(the ratio of existing arcs to possible arcs in the network) will still
return a reasonable value, but it is not really defined if you have
multiplex ties, as you don't know what the max possbile num ties is.  

My soln. was to have calcDensity(ArrayList network) check if the network
was multiplex, and throw a message.  However this takes time, so I was
also creating a method calcDensity(ArrayList network, boolean
isMultiplx)  If false, it would calc the density and return a value
without checking for multplex (expensive) Method won't crash if the net
was multi, just would return funny value.  if isMultiplex is true, I was
going to have it call a method, collapseMulti(ArralyList network) which
would return the network with multiplex ties removed and calc the
density.  This pattern could be extened to other methods as well.  Idea
is that if they don't know what they are doing, things will be safe and
slow, or if they know they've generated a network with no multiple ties,
they can be fast.

But, I realized that it would be dangerous to call collapseMulti from
within another method, as it would delete the ties in the original
network, hence the disire for a deep copy method.  But it made me
realise that there may be other (non-network) cases were people might
want to perform operations on agents without actually modifying the
"real" agents in the agent list.  So perhaps we should implement Mikes
suggestion, but as RepastUtilties.getDeepCopy(Object agent)?  The other
tricky thing is that getting a deep copy of a node would have to return
a copy of the entire network it is connected to, otherwise if it still
has the original edges, changing them would still change the original
network.  

So, as I doubt we will figure all this out before i leave, I'll make
sure collapseMulti is not called from within other methods, that it
doesn't return (to make it clear that it is chaging the pased network
rather than returning a copy), and it is documented as dangerous!

BTW, NetUtilities.isMultiplex(ArrayList network) is a great way to check
if a construction algorithm is working correctly!

best skye

Nick Collier wrote:
> 
> I think Mike's suggestion here is a good one. But a question, under what
> conditions will there be duplicate ties. Is it something we can protect
> against when ties are created, a switch to all multiplex networks, or an
> exception is thrown?
> 
> nick
> 
> 
> --
> Nick Collier
> Social Science Research Computing
> University of Chicago
> http://repast.sourceforge.net