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EMR's picture

Modeling the Universe

I'm excited about trying to work our models as far as possible down the list of capabilities we considered in class.  It feels to me like an evolutionary process, although not purely so.  The way I program tends to be iterative in an evolutionary way- I try something a lot of different ways and then select the one most effective for my purpose.  I then often incorporate this paradigm into my later programs, as it has shown its 'adaptiveness.'    It seems the best way to make an attempt at modeling complexity is go at it in this way, the same way the compleity arose in the first place (arguably).  However, the selective forces used in making our models tend to be directed or driven in a particular direction, unlike true evolution. 

Following the evolutionary paradigm, I think we will have the most success if we start with simple pieces of code and then gradually stitch them together with more bits of code in a hierarchical way, rather than trying to cram everything into one long procedure.  As our models grow more complex, we may also find it useful to start visualizing  them with flow charts of call trees.  I hope that we will be surprised at how far we can get if we each go in our own directions but periodically shareour thoughts with each other.

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