Programming goes Viral
Programming goes viral was a tutorial based project in which I followed a very lengthy step by step on how to create a basic simulation of a virus being spread through out a community in Star Logo TNG. Once it was completed, the tutorial gave prompts on small changes I could make to see different results. At the very end, it said to create my own to monitor and collect data on.
The main simulation had many factors. Setting parameters for making people turn from healthy to sick upon contact was fairly straight froward but making the doctors interact with the people in multiple ways was a challenge. For example, the doctors could either cure a patient and make it immune or just heal it for the time being. This required using a "if, then, or" block. in the end, the programming wasn't extremely hard, but I did learn from it. Running the simulation was simple; clicking setup, infect, forever in that order got the basic simulation running. To add more aspects of infection there were a few other buttons such as a one click money system for buying medicine and a cost tracking graph.
My Test
My personal experiment on the simulation was making the doctors have working hours and non working hours, like in real life. During a certain time set, there are more doctors. This was the day time. during the "night" the number of on hand doctors giving vaccinations and medicine went down. By adjusting the number of people already infected at the start of the simulation and toggling between night and day, I was able to see how many people the doctors could handle depending on the time of day. This obviously was a real world application because in most hospitals and 24 hr clinics, there are considerably less staff on hand at night.
As I guessed, the doctors were able to keep the more people un-infected per capita at night. Although there were less doctors, there was also less people. During the day, there were so many people making contact with each other that even if the doctors were more efficient, the healed would just become infected again very quickly. The first most efficient ratio of humans to doctors was very close to 2:1 but that wasn't really applicable to our population so I wanted to find a bigger number. I changed the night time population to 55 and slowly experimented with different numbers of doctors. One of the biggest challenges I ran into was the doctors healing everyone before it got passed to another. The virus was being terminated pretty quickly and basically ended the simulation. Finding a number of doctors that kept the virus at bay but also let it live a little was a learning curve.
In conclusion, in starLogo land, the best time for a turtle person with virus to get healed is at night. There are less people out to run into and get the virus and the doctors are at a more attractive ratio to the people. In real life, this is quite similar. Many people visit clinics at nighttime for less wait time. The only place I know of that has a long wait time no matter the hour of the day is the emergency room. There seems to be a constant wait at every emergency room 24/7.
Reflection
All in all, this project wasn't too bad. I enjoyed having a tutorial to go by. Unfortunately, I didnt enjoy the main part of the project, the experiment. At first I didn't really know what I wanted to experiment with and had no connection to the medical system. I do think that this project helped me to learn the StarLogo program but I didn't really take much else from it.