Back during the winter break, I read Stephen Levy’s 1984 book Hackers – Heroes of the Computer Revolution. It expounds ad nauseam on the “hacker ethic“, which among other things means free sharing of tools for making tools.

Also over the break I was starting my agent-based model of Bornean fruiting synchrony. I’m making it with the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment. While programming the model I found I really wanted to be able to visualize NetLogo’s random number generators, and their parameterizations.

So I made a random number distribution visualization tool. And in the spirit of the Hacker Ethic, I prettied it up and put it on the website in case anyone else wanted one. I posted to the NetLogo user’s group, but I forgot to mention it here.

So if you’ve been looking for a visually-oriented way of understanding the randomization tools in NetLogo, hey, there it is!