4 ms·
>But with computers so fast, it's quite common for people, especially in conceptual design space, to use Monte Carlo methods since it's a lot easier to believe
by dav_Oz 4y ago
>But with computers so fast, it's quite common for people, especially in conceptual design space, to use Monte Carlo methods since it's a lot easier to believe the answer once you get it.
Is it really easier to "believe" an answer on a purely stochastical level?
I'm kinda surprised, I would be way more confident (if I were to choose) with answers from deterministic descriptions/equations despite being more abstract and potentially harder to "visualize".
I find more often than not supposed 'comprehensibility' on the surface level to be quite misleading. Of course if one doesn't have clue where to start and enough processing power the Monte Carlo method and alike certainly can help to jumpstart/brute force the process.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoYes, definitely. With deterministic methods you have to make all sorts of approximations to discretize the spatial details of the fuel assemblies, the energy space of the neutrons, the angular directions of the neutrons, and so on. The approximations are complex and sensitive. With monte carlo methods you can treat all those things without approximations. Under the hood, both deterministic and monte carlo nucleonics methods are depending on the same measured/interpolated nuclear interaction probability tables (aka nuclear cross sections).
- fastneutron 4y agoMC tends to be more physically accurate (in the limit of a large number of particle histories) because it can simulate radiation transport in continuous space, energy, and angular distribution. Deterministic methods can be faster, but the discretization process is somewhat of a dark art because the underlying distributions can be highly nonlinear and rapidly varying. A combination of methods with varying levels of fidelity are typically used in real nuclear engineering applications, and are always referenced back to a common suite of experimental benchmarks for validation.
- wnkrshm 4y agoYou can write down an equation for evaluating a ray-traced picture with perfect mathematical precision, you just cannot evaluate the integral for any scene that is non-trivial. MC is the integration technique for it. Edit: so you know exactly what you get, if you keep it simple - the gotchas start if you try to be clever and use fewer samples (biased MC)
- dav_Oz 4y agoThanks for clarifying with examples, y'all :) I wasn't thinking concretely but on some vague principle. Now I see, of course, makes sense.