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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

> all such simulations that attempt to model any non-trivial system are imperfect.

I believe the future of such simulation is to start from the lowest level - ie. schrodinger's equation, and get the simulator to derive all higher level stuff.

Obviously the higher level models are imperfect, but then it's the AI's job to decide if a pile of soil needs to be simulated as a load of grains of sand, or as crystals of quartz, or as atoms of silicon, or as quarks...

The AI can always check its answer by redoing a lower level simulation of a tiny part of the result, and check it is consistent with a higher level/cheaper simulation.

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> I believe the future of such simulation is to start from the lowest level - ie. schrodinger's equation, and get the simulator to derive all higher level stuff.

I do hate to burst your bubble here but I've been doing real-time simulation (in the form of games, 2D, 3D, VR) for enough decades to know this is only a pipe-dream.

Maybe at the point when we have a Dyson sphere and have all universally agreed upon the principles that cause an airfoil to generate lift this would be possible, otherwise it's orders of magnitude beyond all of the terrestrial compute that we have now.

To quote Han Solo, the way we do effective and convincing science and simulation now is ... "a lot of simple tricks and nonsense."

I don't think it's a pipe dream from an 'amount of compute' perspective.

Any competent person can simulate 100 atoms in a crystal of some material, and say "whoa, it seems the bulk of this material behaves like a spring with f=kx, lets replace the individual atom simulation with a bulk simulation which is computationally far cheaper", and then we can simulate trillions of atoms.

I don't see why AI couldn't do the same.

One trillion atoms of the heaviest element is less than a nanogram. I get your point it's just that we can't even simulate all the blades of grass on a one acre lawn with every shortcut we have.

Really I think it would be cool to explore -- I've been working on a procedural game engine (conceptually at least) for a long time and want to incorporate even "basic" things like chemistry. I think it's still decades away for that, not even considering quantum phenomena.

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