[ODE] re: hw

[Anselm Hook]

> I doubt it will happen. Games are the only thing that drives these types of
> markets. 1Ghz of cpu power dedicated to physics is plenty of power for most
> anything you would want to do in a game for today. By the time game
> developers figure out how to use that up, there will be 3Ghz of cpu laying
> around idling.

In order from level of crazyiness to level of sanity:

1) How about a digital simulation of an entire watershed - including the
people...

2) Or a simple re-creation of the civil war...  the path of one musket
ball could have very well changed the course of history.

3) Or an Avidia like simulation that uses physics.  There is a certain
minimum threshold of number of participants to start to get real emergence
beyond just the trivial cases of seeing parasitic behavior... at least
thats what the Tierra people say.

4) Or a training ground for an AI bot...  if we want to create entities
that think like us then we need to create digital synthethic environments
that let them explore similar problem spaces.

5) Or even the predictive engine for a pet robot that exists in the real
world.  It might need to do a reasonably accurate simulation in real time
- at least far enough ahead to speculate reasonable repercussions for
certain actions...  hitting a table knocks a cup of water off of it...

6) Or lets say you wanted to create an articulated wing surface; you'd
want to model the hydrostatic forces of how to articulate that wing
intelligently given random turbulence acting on the wing...  this would
require fairly intense computation in real time.

7) Heck, even just a multiplayer game with reasonable physics is still way
beyond what we can do now.  I'm working on a big video game with many
enemies on screen simultaneously - and we simply do not have the
computation to make enemies truly collidable...  the visual artifacts
caused by this are quite visible and glaring.

I honestly have no idea what the future will hold; but I can say that it
would be nice at least to have more computation at my fingertips.

 - a