[ODE] Re: deterministic repeatability issues

[ttl0 at aber.ac.uk]

I am using ODE for AI purposes. I could not get repeatability either. What
I did to get around it though is ran my simulations as seperate processes
that communicated over TCP. The program would start up and wait for a
configuration file over a port. Once a single simulation was run the
process was terminated after transmitting a result. Processes where
spawned in a never ending script.
Thus every simulation would be freshly started and things were repeatable
then. It also meant I could cluster my algorithms using multiple machines.
The server process would jsut handout configurations to a list of named
internet addresses until it got all the results back.
It was crude clustering but it worked well. It also solved a problem of
non deterministic crashing as simulations could fail without disturbing
the main process.

Tom Larkworthy