How To Build The Universe in a Computer
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Top Comments (10)
There's nothing more impressive than a well thought out experiment. Light bulbs? Genius.
Correction: the room-sized computer used to calculate the Apollo trajectories did not have about the same computing power as your smart phone. The IBM 7090 which was used by NASA at the time among others ran around 100 kflops. The GPU of a modern smartphone ranges in the hundreds of gflop up into the tflop range. While there is some debate to be had about sustained load performance, your smartphone outclasses anything NASA had during the Apollo program by at least 5 orders of magnitude.
As a person with a PhD in computer science, I can say there is finally an episode of Space Time I understand (almost) completely.
Who would expect that a dude with some lightbulbs and a notepad could correctly simulate a galaxy merger? Thats the power of science and mathematics, I guess.
Simulations of biological molecules have the same issue. Normally a long simulation of a protein (without full quantum mechanical details) would be around 1 microsecond, which is unfortunately short since some of the proteins have turn over time (the time for one reaction to complete) in scales of seconds. At the current state, it is quite ridiculous even to think about a simulation of a mitochondrion with quantum mechanical details, let alone the universe.
Having programmed gravitational simulations before, the thought that someone could achieve a simulation of that scale with nothing but light bulbs, a luminometer and calculations by hand is mind-boggling to me.
"My computer isn't powerful enough, so why not just represent masses collapsed below a certain radius with a nil pointer" sounds exactly like what a programmer for a universe simulation would think
Fascinating stuff. That light bulb experiment was wonderfully clever but it's pretty cool to see how the development of computers has given us the ability to simulate so much more and with higher fidelity. Props to the people who render that simulation data to make such pretty videos, too. Also dang it's already been 3 years since the Computing a Universe Simulation video. I guess spacetime flies when you're having fun learning :]
Big O notation, explained on universe scale! Epic.
Lol, loved the Aperture Science reference! Gotta love that fuzzy and friendly supercomputer GLaDOS
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Top Comments (10)
There's nothing more impressive than a well thought out experiment. Light bulbs? Genius.
Correction: the room-sized computer used to calculate the Apollo trajectories did not have about the same computing power as your smart phone. The IBM 7090 which was used by NASA at the time among others ran around 100 kflops. The GPU of a modern smartphone ranges in the hundreds of gflop up into the tflop range. While there is some debate to be had about sustained load performance, your smartphone outclasses anything NASA had during the Apollo program by at least 5 orders of magnitude.
As a person with a PhD in computer science, I can say there is finally an episode of Space Time I understand (almost) completely.
Who would expect that a dude with some lightbulbs and a notepad could correctly simulate a galaxy merger? Thats the power of science and mathematics, I guess.
Simulations of biological molecules have the same issue. Normally a long simulation of a protein (without full quantum mechanical details) would be around 1 microsecond, which is unfortunately short since some of the proteins have turn over time (the time for one reaction to complete) in scales of seconds. At the current state, it is quite ridiculous even to think about a simulation of a mitochondrion with quantum mechanical details, let alone the universe.
Having programmed gravitational simulations before, the thought that someone could achieve a simulation of that scale with nothing but light bulbs, a luminometer and calculations by hand is mind-boggling to me.
"My computer isn't powerful enough, so why not just represent masses collapsed below a certain radius with a nil pointer" sounds exactly like what a programmer for a universe simulation would think
Fascinating stuff. That light bulb experiment was wonderfully clever but it's pretty cool to see how the development of computers has given us the ability to simulate so much more and with higher fidelity. Props to the people who render that simulation data to make such pretty videos, too. Also dang it's already been 3 years since the Computing a Universe Simulation video. I guess spacetime flies when you're having fun learning :]
Big O notation, explained on universe scale! Epic.
Lol, loved the Aperture Science reference! Gotta love that fuzzy and friendly supercomputer GLaDOS