4 ms·

Unsure if you are familiar with the project, but Folding@home [0] might be an approximate blueprint for this. Large scale physical simulations of protein struc

Unsure if you are familiar with the project, but Folding@home [0] might be an approximate blueprint for this. Large scale physical simulations of protein structure dynamics, distributed all over. [0] https://foldingathome.org/ https://foldingathome.org/ Edit: Link to project

thephyber 6y ago
I've heard of it, among others. But they are inevitably very specialized applications of what I was hoping would be a general physics simulator (and more detailed at the molecular level than one of the modern game physics engines). I think it's interesting that humans can participate in the process of finding relevant solutions, but I think it's more important that any agent can be used to find and test solutions to specific physics/chemistry problems. My hope was to do for low-level physics what OpenAI does with video games -- using them as simulators for problems and to create competing agents to solve that problem.
- lambdatronics 6y ago
  If I were to do that, I'd use Julia for it. This is a great post about why it's important to have specialized programs -- you can make simplifying assumptions that speed up computation. Multiple-dispatch in Julia allows to hide the complexity under a uniform front-end. http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/algorithm-efficiency-comes-problem-information/ http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/algorithm-efficiency-come...
  - thephyber 6y ago
    I think the generalized version is important for the most accurate (if slow) simulation specifically because it doesn't make the core assumptions that lots of existing specialized simulators make. This is for the same reason you can't use almost any existing airplane simulator for calculating space travel far beyond the parameters of {gravity near the surface of the Earth, air friction far from STP at sea level, time elapsed as the velocity of the craft approaches the speed of light, heat as the aircraft approaches temperatures far beyond its rating}. A very narrow simulator can make approximate values for these items at the cost of not being very flexible for a wide variety of testing. Example: being able to test the properties of a ton of materials at near 0 Kelvin or near their boiling point would be far cheaper and faster if they were in a digital simulation than if we had to hire specialist workers to find the pure material and create the environment required to mimic those settings. Which brings me back to why I posted it here, in this moonshot thread and not just some fan article about a flight simulator. I think a general physics simulator is like basic science -- it's a foundation upon all of the other layers of the stack of existence on Earth is based (ignoring temporarily the more complicated things like consciousness, gods, and other philosophies). If someone sinks the cost for the simulator, they could potentially take a royalty of all of the material science breakthrus of all new innovations found using the simulator.
    - lambdatronics 6y ago
      I think the key would be having a technique to discern when approximations were valid & specialize the right code for the right part of the problem. For instance, if the program mistakenly tried to run the airframe using DFT instead of FEM, it would never get anywhere, but DFT might be exactly what is needed to model the outcome of cosmic ray bit flips in the nav computer transistors. If the simulation is able to make judgement calls like that, it's pretty much a artificial general intelligence.

thephyber 6y ago

I've heard of it, among others. But they are inevitably very specialized applications of what I was hoping would be a general physics simulator (and more detailed at the molecular level than one of the modern game physics engines). I think it's interesting that humans can participate in the process of finding relevant solutions, but I think it's more important that any agent can be used to find and test solutions to specific physics/chemistry problems. My hope was to do for low-level physics what OpenAI does with video games -- using them as simulators for problems and to create competing agents to solve that problem.

lambdatronics 6y ago
If I were to do that, I'd use Julia for it. This is a great post about why it's important to have specialized programs -- you can make simplifying assumptions that speed up computation. Multiple-dispatch in Julia allows to hide the complexity under a uniform front-end. http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/algorithm-efficiency-comes-problem-information/ http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/algorithm-efficiency-come...
- thephyber 6y ago
  I think the generalized version is important for the most accurate (if slow) simulation specifically because it doesn't make the core assumptions that lots of existing specialized simulators make. This is for the same reason you can't use almost any existing airplane simulator for calculating space travel far beyond the parameters of {gravity near the surface of the Earth, air friction far from STP at sea level, time elapsed as the velocity of the craft approaches the speed of light, heat as the aircraft approaches temperatures far beyond its rating}. A very narrow simulator can make approximate values for these items at the cost of not being very flexible for a wide variety of testing. Example: being able to test the properties of a ton of materials at near 0 Kelvin or near their boiling point would be far cheaper and faster if they were in a digital simulation than if we had to hire specialist workers to find the pure material and create the environment required to mimic those settings. Which brings me back to why I posted it here, in this moonshot thread and not just some fan article about a flight simulator. I think a general physics simulator is like basic science -- it's a foundation upon all of the other layers of the stack of existence on Earth is based (ignoring temporarily the more complicated things like consciousness, gods, and other philosophies). If someone sinks the cost for the simulator, they could potentially take a royalty of all of the material science breakthrus of all new innovations found using the simulator.
  - lambdatronics 6y ago
    I think the key would be having a technique to discern when approximations were valid & specialize the right code for the right part of the problem. For instance, if the program mistakenly tried to run the airframe using DFT instead of FEM, it would never get anywhere, but DFT might be exactly what is needed to model the outcome of cosmic ray bit flips in the nav computer transistors. If the simulation is able to make judgement calls like that, it's pretty much a artificial general intelligence.