If you need to measure a billion sticks breaking the simulation might start to come out ahead in terms of cost. I think this makes more sense if you use a brid

If you need to measure a billion sticks breaking the simulation might start to come out ahead in terms of cost. I think this makes more sense if you use a bridge instead of a stick. Building a full sized bridge to test your idea is prohibitively expensive but a simulation is cheaper to build even if the actually simulation is slower to compute. In real life simulations, small prototypes , and full size prototypes are all useful with various trade-offs of cost and benefits at various stages.