Eli5: What is the difference between Emulation and Simulation?
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Emulation has all of the variables. It’s a copy of the original replicated in some other medium. Simulation is missing variables so you extrapolate using machine learning and AI algorithms. I can emulate a video game from Nintendo 64 onto another medium it wasn’t designed to work on like a PC. I have all of the variables to do that I just need a translation layer to translate the Nintendo’s commands into something the PC can understand. Simulation is a bit different. Here I am missing variables. Take the weather for example. We simulate the weather patterns and we can get pretty close for about 5-10 days but then the Simulation breaks down. Why? Because we are missing variables and using AI machine learning algorithms to best guess what it will look like. In order to emulate the weather I’d need a God’s Eye view of where every photon from the Sun hits the earth, where every molecule of air is in our atmosphere, the exact position of every atom of all matter on the surface of the earth, the temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, landscape geography etc. I have some of these things but it’s nigh impossible to see the first 3.
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