
Announcing Wolfram SystemModeler  - mazsa
http://blog.wolfram.com/2012/05/23/announcing-wolfram-systemmodeler/
======
TylerE
Oh, wow this is really awesome. Shame I could never use it, since it's out of
my price range as a hobbyist. Seems insane they don't offer pricing that
covers my use case, especially with stuff like home robotics being such a big
thing these days. There's no way I could afford even 1/10th of the $3.5k they
want for the full version, and I'm not a student so I couldn't buy the $75
student version. I'd have no problem paying $150-200, just to play around with
this.

~~~
anigbrowl
You could always register for a class at your local community college to get
the necessary student ID. But I agree, a 'home user/general nerd' version
would be great, possibly with limitations on export or suchlike.

I'm interested in playing with it too, although strangely there doesn't seem
to be any way to get audio or MIDI into or out of it, which is a pity. I'm
sure it wouldn't be too difficult to add on, since Mathematica has that sort
of thing built in.

~~~
modlfo
In WSM it's possible to create models that call external function in DLLs.
I've been using a modelica wrapper to the oscpack library
(<http://www.rossbencina.com/code/oscpack>) that allows sending and receiving
simple OSC messages. This makes it possible to communicate with music
applications that implement OSC. I've been using it to send input signals from
an iPhone using TouchOsc.

~~~
anigbrowl
Most interesting - thanks for the tip.

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xaa
Seems neat. It's really hard to know whether Wolfram is a visionary or a
lunatic (and by extension, whether the suite of Wolfram products are ahead of
their time or just shiny recapitulations of existing tech).

For example, in his "A New Kind of Science", he basically takes credit for the
entire field of complex systems theory and presents lots of previously known
information (very verbosely) as though it were original research.

~~~
hendzen
While mostly agree with your criticism of NKS, in Wolfram's defense, I have
personally found Mathematica to be a joy to use. Under its unfortunate syntax,
there's a great functional programming language there. While you can do many
of the same things in Matlab or Octave, I always prefer to use Mathematica.

~~~
Create
NKS is BS, I fully agree. And Mathematica borrowed a lot from Macsyma, to put
it mildly.

<http://maxima.sourceforge.net/>

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pjin
This looks like a frontal assault on MATLAB Simulink. Knowing Stephen
Wolfram's past works, I think this will turn out well.

~~~
pvarangot
Simulink was the major reason for choosing Matlab for a current project. Hope
this move by Wolfram also results in improves for Simulink or in a lower
price. It currently sells for around 6k.

Matlab+Simulink had no competing alternative until this.

~~~
Create
<http://www.scicos.org/>

<http://www.scilab.org/products/xcos>

~~~
pvarangot
Thanks, but I'm aware of Modelica and Scilab. In fact I have used them even
more than Matlab, which I have only been using for about a month.

All the academic, hobbist and professional communities in what I'm doing use
Matlab heavily and specifically. Available code/modules/"toolboxes" and
support are severely lacking in Scilab and Modelica. I wish I had the time and
the knowledge to contribute back but I currently don't.

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th0ma5
Paired with the recent free online Model Thinking class, this could help
introduce complexity concepts to beginners possibly ... $35 is nice for a
semester license. I wonder if you could really expose a "swiss cheese" model
of a problem situation? Anyway... complexity is of course complex, but not
necessarily insurmountable or unknowable, so it is really wonderful that we're
ever pushing the bar higher to educate about normal accidents and such (this
has been the bane of my existence in stupid enterprise software sometimes :P)

~~~
draggnar
Can enterprise software can benefit from this type of modeling? One company
that uses modeling to make enterprise just had a significant update today:
[http://www.mendix.com/blog/mendix-spring-2012-release-its-
he...](http://www.mendix.com/blog/mendix-spring-2012-release-its-here/)

It seems like being able to model enterprise apps could be important for
complex legacy systems.

~~~
jcurbo
Yes, in fact an up and coming discipline for this is called model based
systems engineering - data driven, model based development of systems
(including software systems). The main tool in this area is UML/SysML, but it
looks like there is a Modelica-SysML transformation out there.

I would have liked to have seen an IT/network/software example on the
SystemModeller examples page as this could be an interesting tool in that
area.

Edit: just to point out, UML has been around for a while for this purpose, and
SysML is an extension for development of systems in general not just software.

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phenom
Yep, its must be as awesome as Simulink. But in most real world examples you
should use more basic programming languages in order to feel all process
(handle discretization or numerical integration manually). In Simulink you
connect couple block and thats it... everything important are hidden behind
the scene.

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ori_b
It looks a good deal like MapleSim
(<http://www.maplesoft.com/products/maplesim/>). Hopefully it's less
unpleasant to use.

~~~
sfrank
Well, since both are implementations of the Modelica standard I would guess
they are pretty much the same, though I do not know MapleSim or your problems
with it.

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ori_b
It was extremely difficult to model two interacting surfaces -- for example, a
wheel rolling on a surface with friction.

~~~
sfrank
Well, not my area, but a little googling brought up this:
<http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/cellier/MS/andres_ms.pdf> (well, there goes
my evening). I don't know, but I find the decomposition quite intuitive.

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marmaduke
Simulation does not comprehension create;

Reason there is modeling an art be.

"new generation of hybrid symbolic-numeric methods,"

a sense of B.S., this does alerts strongly in me.

\- yoda

~~~
tokipin
"Symbolic-numeric" _could_ be BS, but I'm pretty sure it's not. What might be
triggering your BS alarm is the "symbolic." However this word has a precise
meaning, especially in Mathematica et al's case. It basically means
"replacement rules on arbitrary expressions." For example, we could define a
derivative rule in this kind of way:

    
    
      x^n -> n*x^(n-1)
    

If you have enough of these kinds of rules and a smart infrastructure around
them, you can perform sophisticated "symbolic" calculations. The whole setup
is similar in essence to a Lisp macro system. As a specific example, type the
following into Mathematica (or WolframAlpha):

    
    
      E^(I 2 Pi)
    

The result you get is "1". Not "1.000001", not "1 in floating point", but "1"
as an exact symbol. So when they say they are using "symbolic-numeric"
methods, what they mean is that they are using a combination of _exact_
mathematical calculations (exact according to pure mathematics - thus
invariably symbolic) in combination with numeric approximation/heuristic
methods

~~~
marmaduke
I use Maxima daily, so I get "symbolic". I called BS because they provide no
details, no citations, nothing to make me think they have advanced over
Maxima, or even GCC in terms of optimization of arbitrary computations.

Perhaps more importantly, just because one can build a model does not mean one
will understand the model or the system be modeled. No software will provide
us with good interpretations of our models and their output.

