We've had a lot of discussion about this and we are not happy calling
turtles agents for the reasons you mention like patches and links are also
agents. Though we are not eager to extend the legacy term of turtles
either. It would be nice to find something that captures the idea of mobile
agents. Perhaps "particles" or "boids" or ...?

Particles have the advantage of mapping to physics and lagrangian vs
eulerian frameworks and social systems have taked about active particles.
Boids are unfortunately tightly identified with flocking/schooling but I
think Craig Reynolds did search for a term that was generic enough to apply
to any system that had interactions without calling them birds or fish.

-S



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On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Benny Lichtner <notifications@github.com>
wrote:

> In lib/agentscript.coffee:
>
> > +  # Return a function that returns an object's property.  Property in fcn closure.
> > +  propertySortFunction: (property) ->
> > +    (objectA, objectB) ->
> > +      if objectA[property] < objectB[property]
> > +        -1
> > +      else if objectA[property] > objectB[property]
> > +        1
> > +      else
> > +        0
> > +
> > +  # Return a JS array given a TypedArray.
> > +  # To create TypedArray from JS array: new Uint8Array(jsa) etc
> > +  typedToJS: (typedArray) ->
> > +    (i for i in typedArray)
> > +
> > +# An **BreedSet** is an array, along with a class, agentClass, whose instances
>
> I can see why AgentSet seemed like a poor name choice, since Patches,
> Links, and Agents are *all* types of AgentSets. I believe Owen was trying
> to stick as close as possible to the Netlogo naming scheme, which I think
> is a really important design choice, and one we want to stick with at least
> for the time being.
>
> Here are the Netlogo references on Agents
> <http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/5.0/docs/programming.html#agents>
> and AgentSets
> <http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/5.0/docs/programming.html#agentsets>.
> Definitely read these--we may even want to add links to these references in
> the readme.
>
> Rather than renaming AgentSet to BreedSet (which confusingly sounds like
> the name of a set of breeds), maybe we should rename Agent and Agents to
> Turtle and Turtles? Owen, is there a reason you stayed away from Turtles
> to begin with?
>
> --
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
> <https://github.com/backspaces/agentscript/pull/46/files#r13195244>.
>