Re:What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So Difficult?
by evandijk70 on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @07:12PM
(#16164212)
It is not necessarily the goal to model more atoms than we have atoms to model with. The goal can be, for example, to model a folding protein, which has fewer atoms than a CPU.
That's what puzzles me about this discussion.
Of course we don't. The goal here is to model more atoms than we have atoms to model with. Until we get to quantum computers that can represent more information per atom, than information per atom we want to represent, it's simply a matter of objectively & obviously inadequate resources. You can't simulate wind shear on a plane when there's more atoms in that wind & plane than there are in the computer simulating them: every single atom being simulated contains the complete information about its state (information independent of any other atom), so simulating it will require at least one atom per atom simulated - if you don't have at least as many atoms to simulate as you are simulating, you can't achieve a complete simulation.