Quote:
Originally Posted by aerohead
I don't think that day is too far off.
CFD is coming on like gang busters,and wind tunnel results show increasing accuracy with respect to the numerical models.
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I talked to a MechE PhD student and he told me CFD actually has a long way to go because the algorithms are just too slow (which means, to my surprise as a mathematician, that there is a very very important practical use for PDE research!). Evolutionary algorithms would not be hard to implement for this purpose because you could just have the program randomly add bits and pieces to the shape and see where that goes but since you're running the CFD computations millions of times over you'd need to have a better algorithm for doing that.
On the bright side, the current best algorithms are like O(e^(e^(e^n))) or something hideous like that so cutting it down to say a double-exponential would make this kind of thing feasible on a supercomputer.