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.
Showing posts with label Editorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Editorial. Show all posts
My focus
My interest is simply "how complex things work". Not just any complex things, but things that either seem important to me for some reason, or exhibit some aesthetic attraction on myself.
In practical terms, and as far as railway simulation is concerned, this means the following.
Steam engines show how they work to a larger extend than other traction systems. Also, this traction poses much bigger challenges to the engine designer than other tractions. At least that is my view, and for sure, there is more to see in steam engines.
Route design in the prototype means finding a compromise between desired connections, existing geography, financial constraints on the investment, and economic background of the region defining the amount and type of traffic on the route.
The time starting at the dawn of industrial age greatly influences our lives and what you learn in school is but a few crumbs of the cake. Railways were at the heart of the development for most of that time, and where they were not, the developments influenced the railways, e.g., by shaping traffic patterns.
Railways were among the first technical systems which raised attention for the fields of safety, resource management, and public infrastructure policies. They were not the only ones, but dealing with railway history means dealing with the development in these still hot areas.
Dealing with railways in different countries draws your attention to differences in the economic, geographic, social, political background.
Now, if you deal with railway history, you automatically get all these interesting things served on a silver plate for you. How boring was the geography lesson when we had to learn the names of the rock material of an endless list of mountains in an endless list of countries no one wanted to know about anyway. But if you are attracted by a certain railway line, you start asking why they built this bridge that way and that tunnel at that location, and you plunge into complex background that you would never want to know otherwise. I myself am not a bookworm just for the fun of reading books. I want to process the stuff I read, I need to digest it or it explodes my head. I would feel very bad about just stuffing it all into my memory and letting it rot there.
This is where simulation comes at my rescue, which is the topic of the next article.
On a pragmatic level, I think that today's computers are well suited for simulating and rendering machinery and buildings. In the future, they might also be up to modelling natural things like plants, but for the moment, you need to compromise in this field. I am also interested in simulating plants and animals, as well as human behaviour throughout the ages, but this will have to wait for a decade or two.
In practical terms, and as far as railway simulation is concerned, this means the following.
Steam engines show how they work to a larger extend than other traction systems. Also, this traction poses much bigger challenges to the engine designer than other tractions. At least that is my view, and for sure, there is more to see in steam engines.
Route design in the prototype means finding a compromise between desired connections, existing geography, financial constraints on the investment, and economic background of the region defining the amount and type of traffic on the route.
The time starting at the dawn of industrial age greatly influences our lives and what you learn in school is but a few crumbs of the cake. Railways were at the heart of the development for most of that time, and where they were not, the developments influenced the railways, e.g., by shaping traffic patterns.
Railways were among the first technical systems which raised attention for the fields of safety, resource management, and public infrastructure policies. They were not the only ones, but dealing with railway history means dealing with the development in these still hot areas.
Dealing with railways in different countries draws your attention to differences in the economic, geographic, social, political background.
Now, if you deal with railway history, you automatically get all these interesting things served on a silver plate for you. How boring was the geography lesson when we had to learn the names of the rock material of an endless list of mountains in an endless list of countries no one wanted to know about anyway. But if you are attracted by a certain railway line, you start asking why they built this bridge that way and that tunnel at that location, and you plunge into complex background that you would never want to know otherwise. I myself am not a bookworm just for the fun of reading books. I want to process the stuff I read, I need to digest it or it explodes my head. I would feel very bad about just stuffing it all into my memory and letting it rot there.
This is where simulation comes at my rescue, which is the topic of the next article.
On a pragmatic level, I think that today's computers are well suited for simulating and rendering machinery and buildings. In the future, they might also be up to modelling natural things like plants, but for the moment, you need to compromise in this field. I am also interested in simulating plants and animals, as well as human behaviour throughout the ages, but this will have to wait for a decade or two.
Why I started this blog
My general situation is this: I have a load of ideas, and not so much time to implement them all.
I feel very much at home at UKTS and I abused this forum as my preferred idea dump for years. Since I often love to trigger some discussion, use, development etc related to these ideas, a forum is great for it. In contrast, I am not at ease with the comment feature of blogs. I suggest that if you want to drop me a simple note, do it in a comment in the blog; if you want to discuss an idea, start a thread at UKTS referring here, I will certainly notice (or drop me a note so I notice quickly).
The one deficit of a public forum is that because of its very nature, your thoughts must get buried in the sum of contributions. The other point is that some of my blurbs are just that, and all that follows is a few people saying something polite about it and that was the history of that single-statement thread which subsequently fades into oblivion.
Finally, I have a lot of information bits lying around in drafts of massive documents that never become complete. And when such documents are complete, all they do is impress a few people, but the chance that someone reads 30 or 60 pages are small. I have a vague hope that 1) I might publish useful fragments over the coming month or so, and 2) people might actually digest them, and 3) search functions might bring it to the attention of a somewhat wider audience. But I must say that my topics generally are not exactly funny for a wider audience -- more on that in another article.
Therefore, this blog will be a complement to my continued activities at UKTS, providing a cross reference of old ideas of myself and others; and it will contain a series of new articles on technical stuff floating around my brains and my harddisk.
I feel very much at home at UKTS and I abused this forum as my preferred idea dump for years. Since I often love to trigger some discussion, use, development etc related to these ideas, a forum is great for it. In contrast, I am not at ease with the comment feature of blogs. I suggest that if you want to drop me a simple note, do it in a comment in the blog; if you want to discuss an idea, start a thread at UKTS referring here, I will certainly notice (or drop me a note so I notice quickly).
The one deficit of a public forum is that because of its very nature, your thoughts must get buried in the sum of contributions. The other point is that some of my blurbs are just that, and all that follows is a few people saying something polite about it and that was the history of that single-statement thread which subsequently fades into oblivion.
Finally, I have a lot of information bits lying around in drafts of massive documents that never become complete. And when such documents are complete, all they do is impress a few people, but the chance that someone reads 30 or 60 pages are small. I have a vague hope that 1) I might publish useful fragments over the coming month or so, and 2) people might actually digest them, and 3) search functions might bring it to the attention of a somewhat wider audience. But I must say that my topics generally are not exactly funny for a wider audience -- more on that in another article.
Therefore, this blog will be a complement to my continued activities at UKTS, providing a cross reference of old ideas of myself and others; and it will contain a series of new articles on technical stuff floating around my brains and my harddisk.
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