A few things :)

[Francisco]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, Lee Nutter wrote:

 Hello Lee,

> Im a beginner, and although (i think) I know the base language all 
> right, I haven't really made anything. Can anyone recommend anything for 
> a first project?

 I don't know what areas of interest you have or anything else but since
 you asked, I will recommend what I used :)

 I did a (very) simple program of artificial life, the Penna model, that
 was intended to study biological aging. If you are scared about the
 words 'artificial life', well... don't be, it is indeed a very simple
 model that actually does something :)

 The description of this Penna Model can be found at 
 "Theoretical approuch to biological aging" Physica A 253 (1998) pags
 366-378. I don't know if that article is open to be retrieved from
 internet from any machine (I'm inside an IP block from college, so I
 have access). If you want to take a look at it and can't download the
 article, e-mail me and I'll send you a pdf file. 
  
 DISCLAIMER: I don't have anything to do with the people who wrote that
 article bla bla bla :^P  I just used it to learn python.

 NOTE: a more in depth analysis of that model is found at:
 "Dynamics of the bit-string model of age strutured populations"
 Physica A 242 1997 195-218  ( <- in this case, I had classes with the
 guy who wrote the article)

> Also, I was just wondering, Why do you use python? To me its a hobby. 
> Why do some of you use it over other languages? I love the language, 
> don't get me wrong, I was just curious :)

 I use it for parallel programing (with the hard work done with embedded
 Fortran code), **lot's** of statistical analysis (over the output of
 the Fortran code), plotting of all that is aidded by python and also
 for lots of smaller numerical calculations (with Numerical Python). 

 cheers,
--
  Francisco.
  São Paulo, Brasil.
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