Thanks for your detailed reply. While, perhaps not an expert, I am not completely unfamiliar with the difficulties you raise. I have done graduate computational

Thanks for your detailed reply. While, perhaps not an expert, I am not completely unfamiliar with the difficulties you raise. I have done graduate computational physics and have worked in realtime simulation professionally as well as offline simulation on my own. "Basically, once you’ve simulated it—-assuming you’ve done it right—-what actually have you gained? " Usually you now have a computational model that can give answer for any valid input. This may not help your discipline but it certainly helps others. As you suggested with Ansys, there is always room for improvement on these computational models. I would guess unless there was something really wrong with the approach these improvements are going to be algorithmic in nature. Im not saying algorithms dont potentially have some good mathematical analysis behind them but something like say Barnes–Hut feels far more like a computer science data structure than some symbolic mathematical representation.