Dear collegues. Thank you very much for opinion in advance.
Best regards, Shafagat
Science without computer won't be complete because science gave birth to computer and i think things would have been easy the way it is now
Without computer science will become a tortoise! Unbearable slow! But will not stop!
Even life will be very slow!
Thank you so much, dear @Oluwafemi Samson Balogun, for intersting answer
Thank you very much dear @Subhash C. Kundu, for interesting opinion.
The past shows that at least some scientific problems can be handled without computers?
Yes, Marcel M. Lambrechts,
There are many issues and problems those can be handled manually as well.
I agree with Dear Ronald. The question appears to be illogical. Computer that has become a normal part of life now, itself is an offshoot of science. Science has created computer to help and support scientific endeavours efficiently. Indeed, computers have changed the way of working and facilitated the analytical and interpretation works in modern science. With the help of computer, scientists are no longer constrained to doing just experiment-based or theoretical research. Now scientists can enter results and data into a computer and the computer, utilizing mathematics and abiding by the physical laws, can recreate a virtual physical world right on the computer screen. Computers have become integral part of scientific research in various fields like, health, agriculture, environment, remote sensing, defence, etc. Despite all these, computer can't substitute scientific thought and actions rather has a supportive role in science.
We can imagine science without computer like travel without plane, it is very difficult for humanity.
We can imagine science without computer like travel without plane, it is very difficult for humanity.
Science with a computer: Is the excess of computer-produced scientific information (e.g. with internet) deleterious, or not?
Science without a computer: Is scientific information only based on local information (e.g. without internet) deleterious, or not?
In 2005, an old senior scholar in a 3rd world university was offered a 3rd hand Pentium (II ) computer by the university's administration to use it in his office. He rejected the "improper" offer so the administration punished him for 3 years "without computer". He managed to survive then & his handwritten exams, over the three years (1st, 2nd, and final) in all the courses he taught, were probably the best in his career. Mind you, later on, only typewritten exams were allowed. It is true that the computer is important but one has to cope if it is not present.
“The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.”
Bill Gates
Computers are great tools, however, without fundamental understanding of engineering problems, they will be useless. Accordingly, incorrect or poor-quality input will produce faulty output.
There is a saying about computers "GIGO" stands for "garbage in, garbage out". This saying points out the fact that a computer can do only what it is programmed to do and is only as good as the data it receives and the instructions it is given. If there is a logical error in software, or if incorrect data are entered, the result will probably be either a wrong answer or a system crash.
@ Marcel – Works like record keeping, information retrieval, data analysis & interpretation, mathematical modelling, etc that take a lot of time while doing manually can be done with computers in short time with greater precision and accuracy. Computers have taken science and technology to a whole new level. However, science based on only computer produced scientific information as well as only n local information (without computer), both are deleterious. Computer is an efficient supportive tool which should be used sensibly in science
The question is a little bit strange because it suggests an identity of computers and science. Computers are tools. We all use these tools and think they are helpful and may facilitate the work, but they cannot replace science. Science is in first order a thinking and analysing process. You need models, ideas. Later on you may verify using computers.
To explain my point of view. "Do you think great architecture may be invented and created without machines?". You will hear the same arguments, performing or producing output is easier with machines, but not the creation of the scientific idea.
And ask the dear collegues from CERN or other great institutes, what they will answer to such a question. The great physics comes from the brains not from the computers.
Computer is part and parcel of our life. Each n everything is digitalized including photography. Bank transactions, ticketing (air, road, rail), billing (electricity, shopping, phone, internet etc.). One way automatization (tool) to make things easier.
Of course computer is man-made thing it goes as per the instructions given. Almost all the scientific/statistical analyses are done using computer programs. As said by Peter Drucker 'The computer is a moron'.
Previously office tables used to have type writers now Desktops. Certainly computers are useful tools. Probably it is very difficult to think rather than SCIENCE, LIFE is difficult without computer.
I can't believe that we can live without computers, because we loss my live!
Dear Colleagues,
Good Day,
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes".
----- Edsger Dijkstra
Did someone check whether computers can propose novel ideas in sentences just by recombining huge amounts of existing information and sophisticated computer programs?
Dear Colleagues,
Good Day,
"Computers have lots of memory but no imagination".
----- Unknown.
Computer has now become my tentacles, my sense organs so just it can be imagined without computer.
Before developing a model or writing a computer program for a problem, the user should try to understand all theoretical background.
Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) (from wikipedia)
in the field of computer science or information and communications technology refers to the fact that computers, since they operate by logical processes, will unquestioningly process unintended, even nonsensical, input data ("garbage in") and produce undesired, often nonsensical, output ("garbage out").
History
It was most popular in the early days of computing, but applies even more today, when powerful computers can produce large amounts of erroneous information in a short time. The first use of the term has been dated to a 1 April 1963 syndicated newspaper article about the first stages of computerization of the US Internal Revenue Service.[1] The term was brought to prominence as a teaching mantra by George Fuechsel,[2] an IBM 305 RAMAC technician/instructor in New York. Early programmers were required to test virtually each program step and cautioned not to expect that the resulting program would "do the right thing" when given imperfect input. The underlying principle was noted by the inventor of the first programmable computing device design:
On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher[3]
The term may have derived from FIFO and LIFO accounting, and last-in, first-out (LIFO), first-in, first-out (FIFO) in computing.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out
Science without computer or the net work may delay scientific progress for several decades
Computers have become a necessary part of our life. They are great tools and we can not imagine to live or to progress in science without them. However, scientific progress has been mostly due to human brain!.
The human brain works as a binary computer and can only analyze the exact information-based zeros and ones (or black and white). Our heart is more like a chemical computer that uses fuzzy logic to analyze information that can't be easily defined in zeros and ones.
Naveen Jain
It used to be books, encyclopedias, now it is computers. Still need the experiments to do.
The computer is a necessary instrument for the science, but not the only one.
The computer is the modern Alaa Eldin Lamp. It is the magical electronic computing instrument that fits every where.
Alaa Eldin Lamp!, Nice one!
As much as computers have become a part of our daily lives, they have also become an integral part of modern science. They are essential in helping scientists to understand the world around us.
Computers have changed the face of science so that scientists are no longer constrained to doing just experiment-based or theoretical research.
Now scientists can enter results and data into a computer and the computer, utilizing mathematics and abiding by the physical laws, can recreate a virtual physical world right on the computer screen.
As you have said, computers are a tool and output quality depends on input quality. But microscope and telescope are also tools and there is no doubt that biology and astronomy took a giant leap with these inventions.
Similarly, computers have accelerated scientific progress in almost all areas. When I was a child, I knew that there were 8 planets other than Earth, only three more than the ones known by Babylonians more than 3.000 years ago. Today, we have discovered 2,000 planets outside the solar system and this figure changes annually. This is largely the result of digitalization.
Decades ago, in social sciences --which are my field--,, calculating the results of a survey was an extremely tedious work. Multivariate analysis was not only tedious but elementary, when compared to what we can do today.
Technological development, data production and progress of science represent, I think, a virtuous circle.
Dear all,
Computer is a good servant but bad master. You know that all techniques and instruments are developed by our mind. It is mind that mattered not materials.
First scientist appears; then computer help!
Computer is not all. Computer assist, calculate, help in developing models, complex programming, etc. But computer can't --- think, generate ideas, innovate! A scientist does all these.
Dear Colleagues,
Dear Shafagat,
I would like to thank all the colleagues who upvoted my previous answer on this question by Shafagat. For such questions i am not used to introduce more than one answer. The question is about the usefulness of the electronic digital computer for science. Yes, it is very useful and many problems could not be solved without it.
In every branch of science, there are computer aided analysis and design tools in additions to the simulators which enable the scientist to run experiments without having real laboratory equipment and thereby shortening the development cycles of any object. For example in electronics, there is a computer aided deign tool called virtual electronic factory containing a suit of electronic simulators. The production of the computer itself can not be imagined without the use of computers.
From my point of view, the humans have invented instruments to amplify their capabilities: They invented the microscope to amplify their vision, the mechanical levers to amplify their force, the microphone to amplify their hearing,........, and the computer to amplify their brain.
So, the computer is a brain amplifier.
Sure, it is useful and in some cases it is necessary.
Thank you
They are essential in almost all the business dealings that are made nowadays Computers have become a major part of our lives today. They are essential in almost all our activities including research and teaching.
The following article is interesting and relevant.
Science. 2010 Jul 23; 329(5990): 399–400.
doi: 10.1126/science.1189416
Scientists today cannot hope to manually track all of the published science relevant to their work. A cancer biologist, for instance, can find more than 2 million relevant papers in the PubMed archive, more than 200 million Web pages with a Google search, and databases holding results from experiments that produce millions of gigabytes of data.
This explosion of knowledge is changing the landscape of science. Computers already play an important role in helping scientists store, manipulate, and analyze data. New capabilities, however, are extending the reach of computers from analysis to hypothesis. Drawing on approaches from artificial intelligence, computer programs increasingly are able to integrate published knowledge with experimental data, search for patterns and logical relations, and enable new hypotheses to emerge with little human intervention. Scientists have used such computational approaches to repurpose drugs, functionally characterize genes, identify elements of cellular biochemical pathways, and highlight essential breaches of logic and inconsistency in scientific understanding. We predict that within a decade, even more powerful tools will enable automated, high-volume hypothesis generation to guide high-throughput experiments in biomedicine, chemistry, physics, and even the social sciences (1).
Recent research demonstrates how scientists can use computers to become better-informed and more agile explorers. New computational tools can expand the pool of concepts and relations used for generating automated hypotheses by (i) drawing more from the vast corpus of published science, and (ii) synthesizing new higher- and lower-order concepts and relations from the existing pool of knowledge.
In the past, computational approaches have been more successful in small, well-defined systems than in larger, less studied, or more complex ones. The explosion of data from high-throughput experiments, however, increasingly presents researchers with very complicated systems
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3647224/
Dear Colleagues,
Good Day,
"People are on their computers more than watching TV, because you can only watch voyeur TV, which is basically what reality shows are, for so long".
-------- Stephen Root
Scientist will work! Computer or no computer!
Without scientist curiosity, computer can't help. Computer is to facilitate and advance the work of scientist.
Recent rapid advances in information and communication technologies has resulted in a a faster rate of scientific discoveries Over the past several decades.
More computing power + power of human brain + passion+curiosity = advancement of science.
Dear Behrouz Ahmadi-Nedushan,
Good equation!
But, in advancement of science:
Main role --- power of human brain + passion+curiosity
Helping role --- computing power
Computer is an instrument to help!
Human Brain is the most complex and versatile computer! It also travels at supersonic speeds switching roles of a thinker and doer.
But Computers and super computers are a necessity in the present era. As calculators, storehouses of information to be accessed from everyone till eternity.
Humans should make technology its slave rather than be a slave to technology!
It is not a gainsaying that computer, a byproduct of science has changed the way science works. However, it is good to note that science evolved ever before computer and that computers are a product of science. Evolution of science continues. With or without computers, science shall continue to thrive.
Computers has revolutionized the research tools of engineers and is nowadays besides theory and experiments, essential to many scientists. Many science and engineering projects can not be done without computers (or Aladdin lamp)!.
The following shows how a Computer Just Solved This 100-Year-Old Biology Problem:
Big data—and big processing power—is a big deal for science. By crunching massive amounts of data billions of times faster than could be done by hand, computers have allowed scientists to discover faraway planets, unravel our genetic code, and even find the subatomic particle responsible for gravity. But imagine a future in which computers don't just use their awesome power to help scientists. Imagine a future in which computer can come up with useful scientific ideas and hypotheses all on their own.
Well, that just happened. As they report in the science journal PLOS, Michael Levin and Daniel Lobo, two computer scientists/biologists at Tufts University, have programmed a computer that independently created its own scientific theory.
It's one that may solve a 120-year-old mystery in biology that has eluded even our best explanations: exactly how the genes of a sliced-up flatworm conduct its symphony of cells when they regenerate into new organisms.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a15886/computer-scientific-theory/
Just think back to olden days of 60-70 yrs ago, they had no computers. Computer is a part of science, science is not a part of computer. We depend on computers for fast execution of tasks, research and gaining extra knowledge. No computers will mean reading books for knowledge, storing information on paper and using filing for database work. In my eyes, if we had no computers the world would once again have healthy, intelligent and social. It's people who develop dependencies on things, like computers.
Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living.
~Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1995
@Subhash C. Kundu: Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living.
I agree with Negroponte's observation. It is apparent that there has been a paradigm shift from programming computers to human-computer interfaces. In other words, instead of writing programs to control computers, the focus has shifted to the more interesting problem how to facilitate interaction between computers and humans.
Computer & its related software, firmware & hardware (i.e. storage, security & network devices etc.) are enablers or tools to help people & processes in better handling our works including scientific research, data analytics, engineering projects, manufacturing / business operations etc. In fact as a tool, computer has changed the way we live our lives / lifestyles & this trend will continue. So without computer & its related systems, scientific progress might not achieve the advancements that we enjoy today.
However, we also need to be mindful how to handle the situation when major computer network & its related systems (that we now highly relying on) are shutdown / hacked / attacked - can we fall back to manual method without computer? How resilient is our IT Disaster Recovery Planning / Testing?
Moreover, since computer can automate many of our manual works & it is reliable and we can trust the outcome it produced, how can we prevent falling into the "automation induced complacency" syndrome i.e. we might not capable to detect automation malfunction timely or when the software programming logic suddenly being changed without us noticing it timely? Computer as tool is given in this scientific era - but we also need to ensure computer's continuity is covered in case it breaks.
Hi
If no computer then probably the human mind 'the Best Computer' will definitely think of and make a better alternative ......
We have come from bulky computers to desk tops to laptops to palm tops to ......
May be the next generation devices are linked to our thinking processes and it revolutionizes science.
Science without a computer. Then what will happen?
Things will definitely slow down, but I believe that good scientific results will still come out. In Genetics, a lot of great (Nobel Prize-winning) discoveries were discovered before computer even exists. However, some of the science disciplines will be greatly impacted by it, such as 3-D printing, which use computers/software to design then print.
It won't affect much except lots of files, folders, photocopying, carrying books and papers all the time for meetings and presentations.
I believe before computers, we had better control of time. Before computers, we had clear distinction between office and personal life. Now we are slowly converting our house into part of office with generous support offered by computers.
Many projects are computationally intensive and were not possible without using computers. In facts, we find many examples which require distributed or grid computing.
Examples of computationally intensive projects:
1) In genetics, with increasing data sizes and more advanced algorithms for mining complex data, a point is reached where increased computational capacity or alternative solutions becomes unavoidable.
The implementation of existing bioinformatics applications on Grids (Distributed Computing) represent a cost-effective alternative for addressing highly resource-demanding and data-intensive bioinformatics task, compared to acquiring and setting up clusters of computational hardware in house (Parallel Computing), a resource not available to most geneticists today.
2) Human Genome Project’s success in sequencing the chemical bases of DNA is virtually revolutionizing biology and biotechnology. It is creating new knowledge about fundamental biological processes. It has increased our ability to analyze, manipulate, and modify genes and to engineer organisms, providing numerous opportunities for applications. Biotechnology in the United States, virtually nonexistent a few years ago, is expected to become a $50 billion industry before 2000, largely because of the Human Genome Project.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17377522
“Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.”
— Donald Knuth
Dear Eraldo, That is quite right indeed. However perhaps fits better in a different question. .Something like, "what are disadvantages of computers in our daily life?
Nowadays, we cannot imagine our life without computers and the fact is that they have become so important that nothing can replace them. They seem to be everywhere today.
Computers are practically irreplaceable and we can't make without them anymore. Since 1948 when the first real computer has been invented our life and science has changed so much that we can call it real digital revolution.
Advanced computing technologies made it possible to work on the projects which were not possible before: Supercomputers are the bodybuilders of the computer world. They boast tens of thousands of times the computing power of a desktop and cost tens of millions of dollars. They fill enormous rooms, which are chilled to prevent their thousands of microprocessor cores from overheating. And they perform trillions, or even thousands of trillions, of calculations per second.
All of that power means supercomputers are perfect for tackling big scientific problems. A few applications of super computing:
Understanding earthquakes
Other supercomputer simulations hit closer to home. By modeling the three-dimensional structure of the Earth, researchers can predict how earthquake waves will travel both locally and globally. It's a problem that seemed intractable two decades ago, says Princeton geophysicist Jeroen Tromp. But by using supercomputers, scientists can solve very complex equations that mirror real life.
Forecasting hurricanes
With Hurricane Ike bearing down on the Gulf Coast in 2008, forecasters turned to Ranger for clues about the storm's path. This supercomputer, with its cowboy moniker and 579 trillion calculations per second processing power, resides at the TACC in Austin, Texas. Using data directly from National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency airplanes, Ranger calculated likely paths for the storm. According to a TACC report, Ranger improved the five-day hurricane forecast by 15 percent.
Predicting climate change
The challenge of predicting global climate is immense. There are hundreds of variables, from the reflectivity of the earth's surface (high for icy spots, low for dark forests) to the vagaries of ocean currents. Dealing with these variables requires supercomputing capabilities. Computer power is so coveted by climate scientists that the U.S. Department of Energy gives out access to its most powerful machines as a prize.
http://www.livescience.com/6392-9-super-cool-supercomputers.html
“Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Without computer, there had been great scientists in the world, across countries. I am not against use of computer.
Dear Ronald,
We may also enter a digital dark age with advancement of technology.
The digital dark age is a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been recorded in an obsolete and obscure file format.
The name derives from the term Dark Ages in the sense that there would be a relative lack of written record.
“Science without a computer. Then what will happen?” We can not even dream about this because already we have it. Its invention is a blessing and also a curse. With its invention we are working on scientific research problems that otherwise will never be considered at all. Also with its invention we are reluctant to conceive problems that are not compatible to computer implementation. We are reluctant to take meaningful approximations for achieving close form analytical solutions for intricate research problems. Therefore we miss the qualitative understanding of the related scientific principles. If computer was not invented we would have different kind of research environment. However, now we have become accustomed to this technology. If one fine morning we find “no computer” then all our research activities in all the disciplines including science will collapse.
Science has to proceed with or without computers. Any scholar could be faced with the problem of a computer crash down or by attacks of viruses or by hacking with an eventual loss of stored data or information. To be on the safe side, I usually have paper copies of the important electronic copies. I once stored files in an e-mail run by a famous site but they cancelled my account suddenly without giving any explanation & when I protested, there was no response. For this reason, I think that an intellectual ought to survive if the computer runs out of its fuel !
Many science projects are not possible without the computers
volunteer computing Often called "citizen science," is a form of distributed computing which has continued to catch on since it debuted in 1999.
"Volunteer computing doesn’t get a single job done any faster [than a supercomputer], but it gets a whole lot of jobs done faster in a given time," said David Anderson, a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. "These projects encourage people to think more and learn more about science."
A cornucopia of "volunteer computing" projects let you do that and more by donating some of the spare computational power on your desktop or laptop.
With these projects, rather than a giant, booked-up supercomputer crunching on a massive data set, thousands of regular ol' computers tackle a scientific problem that is broken up into piecemeal "jobs."
http://www.livescience.com/8626-science-projects-run-home-computer.html
There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!
Richard P. Feynman
People who are victim of this disease get addicted to computer. They desperately try to find ways to incorporate computer applications in all their work. Their major activities get masked by computer related tricks. Digital computer is a versatile tool and therefore it should not get more importance than it deserves.
A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind.
Joseph Weizenbaum
Introduction of computer in primary curriculum is a crime. By doing this the kids are denied from learning how to play with numbers. I feel this is very much important and desirable at this level.
For many centuries science has evolved without computers, so science could pursue its evolution without computers; However computers (a product of science evolution) have fasten scientific understanding and scientific discoveries than past centuries. Computers have allowed as well a form of democratization of science, who was close to a certain elite. They have broken frontiers and reduced distances and made the planet as a village. They have allowed scientific thinking to be possible to every task not obligatory for science issue, and made scientific discoveries visible to every throughout satellites or microscopy images. So future of science is close to computers advance, the more computers evolve, the more science could pursue its fast evolution for further discoveries. But we should understood that computers by their own couldn't make science , they only are useful tools to human intelligence.
Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German and American computer scientist and a professor emeritus at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him.
Here is what he has said about role of computers:
"Man is not a machine, ... although man most certainly processes information, he does not necessarily process it in the way computers do. Computers and men are not species of the same genus. .... No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms. ... However much intelligence computers may attain, now or in the future, theirs must always be an intelligence alien to genuine human problems and concerns".
Mostly as human being we solve problems using our previous knowledge. We apply this knowledge logically and try to derive the required solutions. Present computer technology has facilitated the storage and retrieval of large amount of information. Therefore we can employ artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to use such information to derive logically the required solutions. However there is a subtle difference between AI and natural intelligence, which is intuition. Possibly intuition is a meta-knowledge gained from experience. Excessive dependency on computers in academic activities (excluding the storage retrieval and transportation of information) related to science might deteriorate such human quality. We should also remember that intuition played a vital role in almost all important scientific inventions.
Man can dream and have imagination. Dreams separate human being from computers.
Computer simulation methods have gained importance in many disciplines. Computer simulation is used as a comprehensive method for studying systems. This process includes choosing a model; finding a way of implementing that model in a form that can be run on a computer; calculating the output of the algorithm; and visualizing and studying the resultant data.
It is a very valuable tool which its optimal usage depends on the user. Verification and validation of the models and a careful analysis of outputs are absolutely necessary.
Dear Behrouz,
You are absolutely right. Simulator is a very useful tool. But one should cautious about its use because all mathematical model is based on some abstraction and this may have serious effect on the inference drawn from the behavior of the simulated system
"A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man's head" - Charles Franklin Kettering ,an American inventor, engineer, businessman, and the holder of 186 patents. He was a founder of Delco, and was head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947
I agree with Behrouz Ahmadi-Nedushan.
Computers are an useful tool to predict/identify best conditions for experiments. Sometimes it'll make you mad and kill all your time if didn't feed correct parameters. Few years before, one modelling program killed roughly one year of my time. Our modeler, predicted structure of a molecule and claimed that it'll do the expected job (without mentioning what are the assumptions introduced). To prove the model is wrong, I have synthesised about dozen of its broken molecules and proved that the model is wrong.
All said and done now we can not go without a computer because they are already available. To what ever extent we criticize that, the first thing what we do after entering in our office is to switch on our computer. Therefore if one fine morning we find there is no computer, possibly we will be at a loss.
A computer model is a computer program that attempts to simulate a real-life system. In other words, it is a ‘virtual’ version of something in the real life.
In modelling, we must be certain that our computer model represents the system we are modelling with the possible accuracy and always verify and validate every single step.
The computer model is designed to model a system. The more accurate the model, the closer it matches real-life.A model is not very useful unless it can be tested against reality.
The Computer Model represents the implementation of the Mathematical Model, usually in the form of numerical discretization, solution algorithms, miscellaneous parameters associated with the numerical approximation, and convergence criteria. The Computer Model comprises the computer program (code), conceptual and mathematical modeling assumptions, code inputs, constitutive model and inputs, grid size, solution options, and tolerances. Additionally, the Mathematical and Computer Model may include a performance (or failure) model, as well as an uncertainty analysis method, solution options, and tolerances.
The Model Validation assessment determines the degree to which a model is an accurate representation of the real world from the perspective of the intended uses of the model. This information is used to decide whether or not the model has resulted in Acceptable Agreement with the experiment. The question of whether or not the model is adequate for its intended use is broader than implied in the Acceptable Agreement decision block shown in Figure 2. The Acceptable Agreement decision focuses only on the level of agreement between Experimental and Simulation Outcomes, the criteria for which were specified as part of the Conceptual Model.
If a model gives a reasonably accurate prediction on a simple system then we have reasonable, but not irrefutable, grounds for believing it to be accurate in other circumstances.
Source:
Concepts of Model Verification and Validation report written by modelling experts at Los Alamos national laboratory ( a highly recommended Reading!)
Hierarchical level (abstraction) is very important in computer simulation. Suppose we want to model a market in order to decide the purchase of a set of commodities. Our intention is to use this program every day to select the quantities of different commodities such that we can maximize our profit for a given capital. The model should be updated with the market price for bulk quantities and also for retailer marketing. However if we want to use the same program for planning our future business strategy it will not give the correct result. There we need to include the dynamics of the related factors that decide the market behavior. Therefore the model needs to work with much detail information that is in a lower hierarchical level.
Nobody talked about economics. It may depend on your opinion if economics is a science or not. It does no matter. For those who think economics is not a science, my talk can be interpreted how it can be a science.
The absence of workable computers until the last quarter of the 20th century determined the course of economics in an inevitable way. What economists have as an analytical tool until then was mathematics. Majority of economists formulated their theories that are mathematically tractable. This narrowed extremely the problems that can be formulated. The two principles were predominant: Maximization and equilibrium. These two principles have been accepted as main framework of the mainstream economics. Various objections, both theoretical and empirical, had no effects, because majority of economists thought that we cannot construct any theory without mathematics.
Agent based simulation is now changing the economic thinking very much. With this tool, we are now free of the yoke of mathematics. It is true that agent-based simulation is still in a primitive stage and the criticism as GIGO applies. However, we should wait until it becomes more mature tool. Mathematics itself became really usable after about one-hundred-year trials and errors.
See for the further details:
- A Guided Tour of the Backside of Agent-Based Simulation
Research A Guided Tour of the Backside of Agent-Based Simulation
Dear Yoshinori Shiozawa,
Thank you very much for opinion
Best regards, Shafagat
@Yoshinori Shiozawa broadly speaking the word science stands for 'knowledge' it includes each and every subject. No need to feel that any particualr subject is mentioned or not. In general people talk about their own field and assume that either biology or natural science, physics, chemistry only come under science. I do not agree that.
Science(noun)
knowledge; knowledge of principles and causes; ascertained truth of facts
Dear Jetty Ramadevi,
thank you for your comment. I am thinking that economics is a science, but it has strayed in a wrong street. The mainstream (or neoclassical) economics is like the geocentric theory that predominated astronomy more than one thousand years. In the the Alexandrian period, there were philosophers like Aristarchus of Samos who thought it more reasonable to think that earth moves around the sun. David Ricardo is quite similar to Aristarchus of Samos. He has presented a classical theory of value, which was briefly accepted but soon replaced by the more subjective marginal utility theory of value. Economics is still in a pre-Copernican period, so to speak.
Dear Colleagues,
Good Day,
Please, see "How Life was Before the Computer""....
Science was/is/will go on even with or without computer. But with computer, as a great helping tool, science will develop at a faster rate.
Science has an universal applicability which has its root from quite good earlier years for its innovation in sun ,moon ,well many stars & planets in the sky joining with air -fire -water & subsequently on our mother earth .
Computer is the outcome of the recent time & to place the computer in the range of science is making the comparison with childhood period & adolescence .
Computer moves fast & save the time saving working of the people .In this way its is the blessing but at what cost by placing the computer in the hand of school going children ,their mind ,remain working on the computer .They may do the job but even for small calculation ,adding,multiplication ,they require calculated even every where for small business dealers to a business group for billing even a few items they require the help of such electronic units .
For school children tables of number ,& multiplication have become for them the dead past .Electronic development & our brain working that is mentally should work in the line so that our mind may not become machine & we as human being do not become totally slave of our machine .
This is my personal opinion
"Science without a computer. Then what will happen?"
Then, people will start creating a machine like a 'computer'..........
@Yoshinori Shiozawa I am remembering the famous Indian Economist Chanakya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanakya) when I read 'Alexandrian period'. Probably that period only Alexander invade India. Believe all these guys Aristarchus of Samos etc. are contemporaries.
Chanakya wrote 'Arthashastra' a famous book deals about 'monetary and fiscal policies, welfare, international relations, and war strategies'.
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