Simulation for me

There are many heated debates on what is simulation. All good definitions contain the fact that you always depict only a part of the whole, and that it is a model and not the real thing. While these two things are limitations, they give you the big benefit that you can have a simulation of something that you cannot have for real.

This is what I love in simulation: I can afford it.

A cannot afford a real steam engine. I cannot even afford a scale railway layout depicting a 100 km route (which would be just a model itself). But I can afford a simulation of lots of complete trains and long routes.

The other good news is that they sell you mightier and mightier computers for the same money every year. So you can simulate more and more, or have more and more details in your simulation of the same thing, simply by letting the time flow by.

To me, it is something like a historic challenge of our time, to take this powerful tools (the computers and modern software development technology) and apply them to a very noble purpose:- making the ever increasing amount of knowledge/information/data accessible to a wide and diverse audience.

Besides networked freely accessible media, simulation plays a key role for me. Knowledge progresses in big leaps while our brains are nearly the same as 200 years ago. So what we need is a mapping of abstract rules governing complex systems to something we can look at, turn in your (virtual) hands, try out, decompose and rearrange, and explore in all kinds of fashion, and each one to his own accord, at his own speed, and at a time of his choice.

I am well aware that most people just want to be entertained. But entertaining yourself by driving an engine or creating a route, or just looking out of the window of a virtual train while riding through an unknown country is a much more active and thus much more preferable way of passing your time than just watching a movie or reading a book. And you will ask questions about what you see, and to answer them, you will certainly resort to books and movies, just to pick the bits out of the vast information heap that suit your own demand at that moment.

So, there is -- of course -- a need for structured background information, but as entry points -- and to help you process the complex aspects -- you need simulation.

For me, the visual presentation is an important motivation to deal with an issue. While I am interested in complex things, I love to look at nice pictures, too. Often, I find it very gratifying to look at a visual representation of a complex problem I solved. Thus, the combination of both, detailed simulation of complex subjects and detailed, attractive visuals, is what I strive for.

Books can give you very detailed information, but only a very poor fraction of the images you want to see. Movies give you a stream of images you cannot control, and very little information in general. Detailed graphical simulation gives you lots of pictures to view under your own control, and if the nature of what you see is modelled in a detailed way, you get a fair chance to explore the background knowledge behind it.