Assorted Notes and Frequently Asked Questions
-
Occasionally the final energy obtained is different, or the pattern
is slightly varied. Why?
- The simulated annealing process used by
SimSurface is inherently random in nature. Thus when run with
different random seeds, the program may produce different output patterns.
However the differences in energies should be very small.
-
SimSurface is great, but I'm looking for an example of simulated
annealing that does not require as much understanding of physics. Any
suggestions?
- Why yes. We also have a program titled
SimElevator which uses the same annealing process to model the way
in which people arrange themselves in an elevator. If there's sufficient
interest in this (mail us), we would consider creating a Mosaic front end to
this as well.
-
Is source code for SimSurface publicly available?
- In a word, no. But now you can build, run, and observe your surface model as a
JAVA application run locally from user's hard disk by accessing the beta version of the
MASTER SimSurface simulation software.
-
What's the coolest thing about SimSurface?
- Our opinion: when we find
the minimum energy configuration of 64 electrons, we are in essence solving
a global minimum problem in 128 dimensions. If instead we just tested
each coordinate at each of 10 values (a very coarse sampling), we would
have 1.0e128 energy calculations. Needless to say this would take longer
than the age of the universe. Instead, our program runs in about 6 seconds.
Thus as you can see the algorithm used is far more important than
whether the program is run on a Cray, an SGI or a Macintosh.
[ Home | SimSurface Home | Index ]
[ Introduction | Instructional Resources | Simulation Software | SimSurface Help ] [ Fractal Modeling
Tools | Baroreceptor Modeling | GalaxSee ]
[ Gnuplot | The Pit and the
Pendulum | Environmental Models | InteGreat ]
Please direct questions and comments about this page to WebMaster@shodor.org
© Copyright 1994-2006 The Shodor Education Foundation, Inc.
|