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Comment by wespiser_2018 | Hacker News Reader

wespiser_2018

This looks like a bunch of "Sales-Foo". What is the underlying algorithm, and how does it work to help business solve specific business problems? Machine learning techniques are rarely revolutionary, so what is this based off of, and what are the pros/cons of that approach?

I don't know, but this "coming soon" code base always makes me think it's vaporware.

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> As much as 10-50x faster than existing best-in-class tools. We’ve flipped simulation software on its head through modern functional programming.

I'd guess they accelerate simulations on the GPU and/or over multiple cores.

Rarely revolutionary since this is certainly best practice in any serious application domain. Might make it much more accessible to implement though.

We'll see, I also remain rather sceptical.

It looks like they are using Rust, which is at least a positive.[1] Further, there are a few "wins" for agent-based modeling, like traffic congestion and supply chain optimization (wikipedia). However, in agent based modeling, you are looking for emergent behavior (i.e. simulating sheep farmers and observing a "tragedy of the commons") and require you to correctly assume the proper agent actions for given states. Further, explainability (why the model says X given conditions W,Y,Z) is pretty poor for ABM, but the solutions could still be useful in a black box way.

There's no doubt in my mind that you can run 10-50x faster ABMs than whatever tool exists using by leveraging advances like cloud computing GPUs, I'm just not sure what that actually get you in terms of problem solving capability. It's not like 50x speed like bring these models onto my phone, they will still be the domain of data scientists and subject matter experts with the patience to wait.

[1] https://www.meetup.com/Rust-NYC/events/266627924/?aff=garysg...

I imagine you can do 50x faster ABM just by tuning, writing in a compiled language, owning the low level library routines that do the work etc.

I mean, most ABM is probably sub-optimally implemented. There must be lots of “leading” software that squanders the resources it is given to run on.

So, just implement with some mechanical sympathy and you get order of magnitudes improvement.

>through modern functional programming

I find it odd that the only technology they use and mention is "functional programming", which realistically only tells me something about how their code is structured.

Your comment looks like someone who wouldn't use the service even if you understood what simulations as a service actually were. You still get your moment to express a distrust of marketing copy and a chance to vent about bad decisions you've made in the past. Enjoy.

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