Sponsored by Toyota
Toyota's remedy for floor mat entrapment view!
youtube.com - Toyota explains what is being done to address the potential floor mat entrapment of accelerator pedals.
14 Comments
- aurath, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12soon we will never need to leave the computer again! rejoice!
- MatttK, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11You obviously didn't see Jurassic Park.
- tasadar24, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Or Hackers...
HACK THE PLANET! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9So now we can simulate working on something that's too small to actually work on. w00t.
- Durrok, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9“When you look through a microscope, you don’t see some things that modeling and simulation show."
That can very easily be because it isn't really there... kinda like how we don't fly through PCs with a visual gui when we are trying to hack them. ;) - Mousse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5nwily,
Computer models will never give a better simulation of reality than reality itself, but I don't think that was the intended sense of 'better'. When conducting nanoscale experiments it is often difficult to glean all of the information one might want from a system. Computer simulations, however, are infinitely scrutable and, in turn, give us a better understanding of the complex interactions that occur that can't be simply extracted from an understanding of physical laws. - nwily, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I feel like this whole article is a troll.
Nanoscale computer simulations allow us to discover how the laws of physics that we do understand can generate unexpected results. However, nanoscale simulations aren't "better than reality" because a perfect simulation requires a perfect understading of physics. Since there are many properties of physics that are not yet fully understood, it doesn't make sense that we would be able to program a computer to simulate them. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Give the world to the hackers. Hackers and nano technolgy? wow.
http://www.oozm.com/nano_technology - aznbond, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I think a lot of you are missing the point of the computer simulations. They're not necessarily there to help verify areas of physics (at least not how I interpretted).
I myself do research involved AFM and I've come across countless situations where I obtain weird data that I can't really explain (well, it's usually contamination). But if the simulations they propose can give valid estimates and correlation to real life data.. then that relieves some abiguoity with the data.
As for many of the comments above; stop insulting stuff you have no grasp on. That's why /. has better comments than digg. - prytz420, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I think the point is to use experiments to discover the laws of pysichs then use algorithms to describe all the pieces of the puzzle. Then you can reconfigure the puzzle many ways through simulations rather than
have to do physical experiments, thus saving time and money.
Might lead to faster advances in material science, nanotech. - fquednau, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Well, the article is OK, just digg's headline lacks understanding. If anything, a simulation may have a better resolution in comparison to currently available means of investigating on and gathering data about a given experimental setup (i.e. not reality itself). Furthermore, this is a fair statement as long as the mathematical modeling behind it is not disproved. Still, article dugg as one can catch a glimpse of how elaborate physical simluations have become. I liked the statement that the process of comparing simulation outcomes to experimental results is also being automated. Simulations can be amazing time-savers and I am sure that they will often help in areas of physics where experimental results are not as readily available as one would like. I mean consider the area of cosmology. Tons (or rather Teraflops) of simulations there!
- PetroleumJ, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Isn't this like not paying attention to significant digits? You don't get accuracy to 6 decimal places by multiplying 2 3decimal accurate numbers. Your data can only be as accurate as the model used to generate them. And accuracy can only be defined in relation to the thing being modeled via real experiments.
- obeseotron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As long as there is some way to verify what the simulations show you, it's fine. If you're trying to figure out what to actually test in the real world, running simulations can point you in the right direction, but if you can't prove it through observation, it's not practical science, just an unproven theory.
- disc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1You are absolutely correct. Computer models are a great way to keep track of a problem where the number of interactions are too large for a person to keep track of, but there is just no way that we can deduce new information from simulations; we are bounding the problem to the conditions we specifiy in the simulation. Simulations might explain interesting effects that are caused by laws we understand, but they're not going to create new laws for us.


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