Re:Detailed simulation of complete minimal cellular life
by periheli0n on Saturday February 26, 2022 @08:38AM
(#30477452)
Computers being fast enough to do this in biology education is quite along way out. They probably used a farm of Nvidia racks for several months to obtain the simulation.
Personally I doubt that an atom-scale simulation of a cell is very useful for education. Rather, I’d approach it in a hierarchical fashion, where progressive coarser scales are used to model progressively larger systems.
This way one learns not only about a cell, but also about principles of modeling, and that each model comes with assumptions, simplifications, and errors.
Choosing the right scale of modeling for the problem is crucial. In this case they have chosen a very fine scale to model a rather large system. But what’s the scientific insight gained?
Personally I doubt that an atom-scale simulation of a cell is very useful for education. Rather, I’d approach it in a hierarchical fashion, where progressive coarser scales are used to model progressively larger systems.
This way one learns not only about a cell, but also about principles of modeling, and that each model comes with assumptions, simplifications, and errors.
Choosing the right scale of modeling for the problem is crucial. In this case they have chosen a very fine scale to model a rather large system. But what’s the scientific insight gained?