[So shoot me: I'm an engineer] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum

A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum

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So shoot me: I'm an engineer

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Posted by: Katherine Derbyshire

I'm not a theoretical mathematician, or a theoretical computer scientist, or a philosopher. If I were, I could no doubt gaze upon the wondrous patterns of NKS and be content.

But I'm an engineer. I want to build stuff. I need to model processes that exhibit some degree of randomness: phase transitions, fluid flow, electron drift, infiltration of porous media. Those are processes that traditional models don't handle especially well, and that seem to fall under the domain of NKS. Yay!

So I come here, look in the "Applied NKS" forum, and find myself neck deep in theory, philosophy, and arguments about what the wondrous patterns of NKS actually mean. I look hopefully at a thread called "Most successful application thus far?" and feel my toes slip on the mossy bottom, as I scramble back from the edge of a deep ocean trench filled with theory and philosophy.

Could someone throw me a lifeline before I drown? Is there, somewhere within the SIXTEEN DIFFERENT Wolfram sites, a coherent bibliography on NKS applications?

(Yes, I've seen http://www.wolframscience.com/refer...bliography.html . It's an unsorted list with hundreds of items and no links or abstracts. Good for PR, useless for research.)

(Yes, I've seen http://library.wolfram.com/ . It's a little more organized, but also useless. Poorly indexed, with no way to find the full citation or abstract for an item without clicking through to its specific page. No links to original sources, not even a way to merge several pages into one for easier access. Looks pretty, but useless for research.)

Thank you for your assistance.

Katherine


Posted by: Todd Rowland

True, enough, this part of the forum has been infiltrated by threads which belong in either Pure or Philosophy.

It is a bit of a challenge to organize the applications, which are not easily categorized as the theoretical simple rules.

Every year at the NKS Summer School, we have one or two engineers, and they have done some interesting stuff.

I like the work of Vallorie Peridier. See for instance her conference materials from NKS 2007 on using reversible cellular automaton to model solutions to inverse problems in engineering.

There is also the work of Thomas Speller (also a presenter at NKS 2007), who has a wide collection of promising ideas.




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