[Noisebridge-discuss] Philosophy and Computer Language Question

[Ryan Rawson]

Computer simulation comes in two varieties generally:
- discrete event
- continuous simulation

The latter is more about differential equations and whatnot. Event coordinates usually in floating point, so limited by how one sets that up (the natural limits of IEEE 754 floating point). 

Discrete event is more typical for many applications. Time coordinates are arranged in advance, and there is a quanta of time. Sometimes this is also the limits of IEEE 754 pointing point as well. As events are introduced to the system they are combined with other state by the computational functions into new events and new state. At this point it becomes a data structure problem - how do you efficiently store everything and allow for easy computation. Normally the system has a current state, a history archive and every "time tick" it calculates the next state. Outside events (eg: hci or the result of some other function) are introduced and processed.

The best known example of a computer simulation is... Games. Have a look at game building toolkits for examples of how the simulation is handled.

A typical undergrad course in computer simulation would include coding in a general purpose programming language and also assignments in something like mat lab as well.  There are general methods to do discrete event simulation (where time marches in quanta) but there are not many easy ways to do continuous event simulation.

This is where things get interesting. Think of airflow over an aircraft. We would say in the real world it is a continuous process. How would one simulate? Often the simulation is broken down into tiny quanta of time and that becomes the limitation of the model. 

And this is where modern quantum physics enters.  One school of thought says that, like light, time and distance is also quantized. Now we can imagine the universe a one giant simulation stepping forward into time one quanta of time at a time. (yikes). This is where the physical reality of "the universe is a simulation" starts to actually become less crazy sounding.

And at the large scale, doing simulation of real events is really really hard.  This is why high ram, high CPU, vector machines are still popular. Things like weather and nuclear explosions are difficult to simulate on A distributed system where the cost of communication becomes the cost of computation.

Hope this helps.

On Dec 24, 2011, at 8:35 PM, Caleb Grayson <calebgrayson at gmail.com> wrote:

> lo all,
> 
> i’m working on a Philosophy paper regarding astrology, Whitehead’s Process Philosophy, and the simulation of reality in computer languages. 
> 
> would anyone have a source they can direct me to where i can get an idea of how reality is simulated in computer languages?  Process Philosophy states at there are no substantive objects, but that all ‘things’ are functions that process experience into results that become ‘mortal’ in the Creative Advance of time•space.  this is very similar from my recollection of event driven applications.  
> 
> my particular interest is how simulations handle events in time and space.  how does a simulation taken multiple input from multiple functions or users and align them in time•space.  what would those functions look like?  
> 
> trying to finish up the semester for X-Mas,
> 
> merriment to all,
> 
> Caleb
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