If simulations are programs, don’t they just tell us what we program it to?
In: 3
Yes, but…
First terminology.
A model is a set of inputs, outputs and rules that determine, what will be the output based on input. So essentially, per your question, model is the program.
Simulation is a single run of the model.
Models can also be static (no internal memory) or dynamic (has internal memory) and can have feedback loops ie. connecting outputs to inputs.
In the simplest case when the model is static without feedback it is fairly simple to calculate, maybe even on paper, what the output is going to be.
But when dealing with reality, the model will likely be dynamic so running the same model twice with same inputs may generate different results because after running it once the rules inside changed (so on paper, you would also need to calculate it twice) and it will likely have feedback loops, so the output of second run will depend on the First input, internal states, outputs, second set of inputs and internal state after first run. This is getting hard to do on paper.
Now imagine, that you have thousands of inputs, tens of thousands internal rules, hundreds of outputs that that fed back to the input and you want to run it for a minute at a half a second interval, ie. 120 reruns.
So yes, you are correct it only does what we programmed it to do (tens of thousands internal rules) but while for computer applying them 120 times is question of a really short time, on paper, to figure out what the results would be, would take a really long time
Latest Answers