Recommend adding (1996) to title. That doesn't take away from it, it just shows how prescient the thought was.
It also explains why all the links are dead
Computer Modeling Should Become a Popular Hobby
11–20 of 54 posts
Re: Computer Modeling Should Become a Popular Hobby
#12I'd love to see more "gamey" and fun platforms for agent-based modeling (Sims, but with different types of goals to tweak!) and something for system dynamics modeling. There's been a few runs at both, but for how poor human brains are at intuiting things about non-linear systems, and how desperately we need to understand them, more things in this area would be great!
Factorio is a great game that teaches system dynamics without having that as an explicit goal
Re: Computer Modeling Should Become a Popular Hobby
#13Agree broadly with everything in the article. However, I have one point to add: > Physical models that reproduce behavior are limited by the physics of the world, while computer models have much looser bounds. This is also one of the weak points of computer modeling. The outputs are strongly influenced by modeling assumptions, and without feedback from reality, one can easily be deluded towards wrong models. The comp…
"All models are wrong, but some are useful" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
Re: Computer Modeling Should Become a Popular Hobby
#14> The fog surrounding economic projections, and the other uses and abuses of statistical evidence in politics, might lift at least a little. The perpetual historical failure of academic economic modelers is a counterexample to this line of thinking; to think non-academically trained folks would fare better is laughable
I mean, this was the essential point that brought about chaos theory, right?
Rounding wind speeds down at the force of a butterfly flap caused significant deviations for known weather patterns.
Having people half-ass assumptions because they read about a supply/demand curve once and can scrap DJIA data in order to gamble their 15k savings is unlikely to be widespread, but definitely something to consider if that is your argument.
However, it would still least breed familiarity. I take your point that this will probably not help things and...well, I guess I've run out of steam in my own comment.
Ignorance is bad, and staying in ivory towers will end badly. The obvious route for education will likely only foster arrogance and cynicism. What's the third way? Make everyone read Kant and write "Marx was a philosopher, not an economist" 100 times?
Re: Computer Modeling Should Become a Popular Hobby
#15It is a shame that the field is pretty undeveloped still after 20 years. Only recently there have been popping up few consumer CADs (fusion360/onshape), but those are still quite limited and of course do not satisfy free software user like me. Setting up decent physical simulations seems yet another whole endeavor even if you got your model done. There are few physics engines available, but using them seems to require fair amount of work even just for basics. Then comes the social sharong aspect that the article mentions as "Shared federated simulation environments". While I don't think that we need such fully immersive shared environment that the author envisioned, just being able to share models and simulations for exploration on the web would be nice. Being able to get nice photographic-like visualizations would be then the cherry on top this whole thing.
Re: Computer Modeling Should Become a Popular Hobby
#16Recommend adding (1996) to title. That doesn't take away from it, it just shows how prescient the thought was.
Yes. It goes further back than that. That's what Alan Kay thought Smalltalk should be for. Read "Personal Dynamic Media".
Going forward, there are the persistent shared modifiable virtual worlds, from There to Second Life to SineSpace and beyond. There are many good 3D CAD systems now, and the pro ones have some simulation capability. There's Minecraft and its imitators.
We have the capability, and sizable numbers of users. It's not mainstream, but it's in wide use.
Re: Computer Modeling Should Become a Popular Hobby
#17Years ago I read "Growing Artificial Societies - Social Science from the Bottom Up" by Joshua M. Epstein and Robert L. Axtell and was really motivated to do computer modeling as some sort of hobby.
For me at least the problem was once I got their original model up and running I wasn't able to sustain the focus to construct a graphical representation that was compelling. So I never went back and debugged the stuff that I added to model (not seriously anyway).
Re: Computer Modeling Should Become a Popular Hobby
#18I think it has, just not in the way the author intends here. This article was basically written on the cusp of the game modding scene really taking off online, followed by the indie game revolution of the early 2000's into what we see today as a glut of games being released. The popular computer modeling pastime is game development and exhibits much of what is talked about in the article.
Re: Computer Modeling Should Become a Popular Hobby
#19Agree broadly with everything in the article. However, I have one point to add: > Physical models that reproduce behavior are limited by the physics of the world, while computer models have much looser bounds. This is also one of the weak points of computer modeling. The outputs are strongly influenced by modeling assumptions, and without feedback from reality, one can easily be deluded towards wrong models. The comp…
"All models are wrong, but some are useful" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
I like how Paulien Hogeweg phrased it too: "thinking in the most interesting simplification" [0]
I always thought the 'but models are wrong' is quite a weak excuse. Newtonian physics is a wrong model of how the universe works. Using it though; we put a man on the moon. Einsteinian physics are incomplete, but it allows us to use satellites moving at roughly 10KM/s to pinpoint our location to within a few metres.
A model's usefulness is not about how accurately it describes what is happening, but about whether it describes what happens at a certain meso-scale accurately.
[0]: http://www.labtimes.org/labtimes/issues/lt2011/lt07/lt_2011_...
Re: Computer Modeling Should Become a Popular Hobby
#20VRML became really good a couple of years after this with SGI's CosmoWorlds. I built some incredible things with it, with my actual sister as if we had gone back to childhood with the LEGO bricks out. In fact my sister's well paid career is entirely due to how impressive the VRML that fitted on a floppy disk was. Funny to think that you also applied for jobs by post back then.
Admittedly the texture rendering was not up to modern gaming standards but everything worked and existed on a beautiful imaginative plane - much like how a little bit of imagination is needed with LEGO.
But then we realised nobody else was on the trail. Our models were far in advance of anything published online. Only the SGI demos were cooler than what we had come up with. Then there weren't many of those beyond the demo disk that came with new SGI machines (and needed the power of an SGI machine).
The tools - Cosmoworlds - were fantastic and not hard. I particularly liked the audio aspect, being able to have different music play in a scene and for the stereo to move around as you explored a scene. If I was a musician then I would have wanted my album played that way.
But no musician thought to put their traxxx in a 3D virtual world, online for the world to hear. They had distribution in those days so the required VRML viewer could have been distributed on CD to solve the problem of that ten minute download over dial up.
3D then became the cottage industry that it remained, only done in games companies or by specialists doing things like oil exploration, CAD or other things like TV adverts. Despite the wonders of CosmoWorlds it never became this accessible thing that people wanted to play with in a Lego like way.
After my sister and myself pushed VRML so far my sister ended up working in a world where the interactive exhibits she was to be building for one of the world's greatest museums would only ever be flat and two dimensional. The portfolio of awesome interactivity that got her the job never made it past the bureaucracy, committees and bullshit of the regular world. It was a glimpse of a future that was never going to happen, a high note of creativity to never be reached again. We downsize our dreams, from 3+ dimensions to 2.
The problem wasn't us or SGI's CosmoWorlds. It was everyone else. We are not that adventurous as a species. On a given day the finest mountain tops with the most awesome views only have a small amount of people there, not seven billion people. Even though getting there needs no more effort than putting one foot in front of the other for half the day.