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I think there's a difference between understanding a system well enough to make predictions, and recreating a system (a simulation) and then seeing what it does
by Thorentis 6y ago
I think there's a difference between understanding a system well enough to make predictions, and recreating a system (a simulation) and then seeing what it does. Many times in history before the physics was properly understood, the best scientists and engineers could do was create some kind of "dry run" and simulate/recreate whatever process they were testing, and use that to predict outcomes of the real one. But actually being able to look at the state of a live system and predict what it will do next accurately is quite different.
- antepodius 6y agoIt seems to me to be more of a spectrum, where a 'well-understood' system is one we can simulate accurately with extremely pared-down models. (I.e., we can simulate it much more cheaply than running the whole atomic simulation) because we found symmetries/simplifications/shortcuts. Approximating ballistics arcs with parabolae, for example, is sort of a compression algorithm on the full simulation.