• Question: how would you messure how to kill a bug by learning how to kill computer bugs wouldn't they be different to each other in ways that might not allow you to messure or compare them both

    Asked by drtrollface to Carol, Ellie, John, Philip, Rebecca on 3 Jul 2012.
    • Photo: John Welford

      John Welford answered on 3 Jul 2012:

      I guess that question is really aimed at Ellie, but I’ll try to give you an answer from my point of view…

      Computer simulations and computer models are used in all kinds of science (and engineering, finance, manufacturing, etc, etc). They are used because they are cheaper, safer, faster or simply easier than actually performing the experiment. In fact, probably several of those reasons! Unfortunately they will never be as good as doing the real thing, as you always have to guess or approximate some part of your model.

      So you’re totally right, the computer bug might be slightly different to the real bug, and what works on one might not work on the other. That’s why it’s always good if you are able to perform a real experiment to check whether the results you are seeing on the computer are the same as the results in the real world.

      Sometimes it’s just not possible to test a computer simulation until the actual event though. For example if you’re sending a rocket into space it’s probably not practical to send up a test rocket beforehand to see what happens!

      In my research we are interested in selecting the best motor to do a particular job. There are hundreds of different motors out there that we could buy and test, but that would be really expensive and time consuming. So part of my work looks at building computer models of the motors so that we can quickly select the ones that might work best. When we have narrowed down the selection maybe we will buy a few to see if we were right!

    • Photo: Carol White

      Carol White answered on 6 Jul 2012:

      Computers aren’t very good at simulating the natural environment yet – they do an amazing job, but they need to be very powerful to work through all the variables.

      It’s hard to predict how a superbug (the medical, human infecting kind) would respond to different treatments and whether or not it would mutate to cope with our attacks.

      But you’re absolutely right, computers are one of our best tools for trying to do this!

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