Holy smokes! This is going to be a great tool for my games class next fall. The wizards of MIT recently announced StarLogo TNG, the next generation of the long running Star Logo 2 software. Forget what you know about Logo as a single abstract “turtle” going forward 50, right 90. Like the original Star Logo, this version allows you to set zillions of turtles on the loose so that you can simulate phenomena like the flocking of birds, the spread of disease, the bottleneck at the I-5/805 split or other complex decentralized behavior that emerges from simple rules.
What’s new in TNG is that the world is 3-dimensional and the turtles are animated and a lot more turtlescent. They don’t, in fact, have to look like turtles at all and the backdrop can be grimy and Quake-like, or sunny and Teletubbyish, or whatever you want.
It’s only out for Windows now, but a Mac version is imminent. I can’t wait to give it a try.