Is the pool running dry or are they simply not putting enough water in or allowing enough people through the gate? I've seen the job ads. Must have five years. Must have x, y, z. For a junior position. Unrealistic.
Same person can get a web job elsewhere with much less nonsense. So off they go.
Like a lot of things in IT these shortages are nonsense. They are lobbying for visa relaxation or similar so they can pay less.
Here is a very brief and basic introduction to numerical simulation:
Simulation of dynamic systems is a big deep area. In general you use what is called numerical simulation where you have a model describing your system, in the form of a partial differential equal equations.
You start with the chosen initial conditions, choose a delta-t as your time increment, and solve the equation for those inputs. That result is the input to the next iteration.
The most basic algorithm to solve such an equation is “Newton’s method” but no one actually uses that, they use many more advanced methods. But if you are learning that is where you start.
This approach has advanced greatly over the last 70 years. Doing numerical simulation is why early computing work got funding, to simulated nuclear reaction inside bombs.
Now numerical simulation is the occupation of all the worlds top super computers. It’s used for climate simulation, bridge strength, how sky scrapers flex in the wind, testing car crashes or even simulating the strength of ceramics. Oh and it used a lot in financial simulations to model risk and calculate the price of assets.
Right now I'm playing with simulated weather systems using an automata for each grid location at an effective resolution of a square km. I'm getting predictive real-world accuracy within around 10 degrees C with a range of 2 days. Very rough. Takes a long time to simulate a globe which I've found is really important to do. A limited region is usually not as useful.
Its an interesting field. But its seems not so easy to get the real methods used by the bigger models.
Such simulations usually consist of three major systems (atmosphere, land, and ocean) that are coupled together at their geometric boundaries by a coupler that 'communicates' values like temperature from one domain to another. The coupler is needed because of different grid geometries, time step size differences and other aspects.
You initialize the system at some known state (I.e. set the temperature, pressure, etc. at all grid points to real world measurements) and then integrate a complex differential equation for the next time step and so forth. So it is not like a automaton. Finite elements analysis comes closer, but I think they use a different scheme like finite volume methods.
> Do you give it a starting point and apply it to a bunch of elements like some giant automata like game of life?
Roughly speaking yes. Divide all into a grid of cells. Model a cell state with a bunch of numbers, apply some rules to update cell state with neighbors. The trick is to figure out rules of updating state. One needs to write differential equations first, incorporating all relevant physical processes into them, and to transform equations into those rules of updating, which will be a way more complex than with Game of Life.
Though it may be even more complex, like different time steps at different time-points, or changing a grid of cells to increase details in some areas where much is going on by slowing down simulation. Most of complications are due to a limited abilities of our computers: the idea to get more precision by calculating less.
I'd connect it to social media and have it write comments on random posts. For fun perhaps it would reply mostly about AGI topics but also general mathematical topics as well. This would be a simple way of exercising its ability to synthesise language usage beyond the expected collection of word chains usually employed by ML techniques which are often tricks rather than real learning.
Upvotes and replies would serve as metrics on how well the AGI is progressing.
Sounds like you forgot why you started AND/OR haven't broken the next step into something small enough you can continue/resume. That sense of why clarifies the drive to move forwards. What's blocking the next step? Too big a jump? Something in the way that you need to step around?
So we learn the real answer is 256^1024 according to a limited concept of combinations. Its not so good when a mathematician makes such a rudimentary mistake using high school or secondary school mathematics but that's another conversation.
I'm not even sure you can accurately tell me all the uses for a 1 bit value let alone a kilobyte. The number of uses is independent of the number of combinations. If your answer is two you're way off.
Since when does knowing how many combination of states determine what you can do with something? Just because something has 256 states doesn't mean there are 256 different uses for it. There might be 124 uses for binary 00000000. But you won't know that by calculating 2^8.
There might be only three uses for 10100111. One of them makes the world feel pleasant, another melts your face off and another releases three male rabbits into the same cage. But I doubt there's only three. There's likely millions of potential uses for just that pattern alone. How exactly would you calculate how many? Accurately? I'm unconvinced.
The real issue here is lack of imagination. Placing limits where none need exist as well as failing to see possibilities without considering the vastness already present. 2^8 doesn't even begin to cover the number of uses for a single byte.
Rephrased differently: how many uses for a hammer? Can you know only by analysing its orientation? I doubt it.
Rephrased differently (again): feeding a particular combination into different machines will generate a different result. Can you predict the number of results from a given combination without knowing how many machines could process it? I doubt it. The question itself has too many unknowns in it.
