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Computer Simulations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Paul Humphreys
Paul Humphreys*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Extract

A great deal of attention has been paid by philosophers to the use of computers in the modelling of human cognitive capacities and in the construction of intelligent artifacts. This emphasis has tended to obscure the fact that most of the high-level computing power in science is deployed in what appears to be a much less exciting activity: solving equations. This apparently mundane set of applications reflects the historical origins of modem computing, in the sense that most of the early computers in Britain and the U.S. were devices built to numerically attack mathematical problems that were hard, if not impossible, to solve non-numerically, especially in the areas of ballistics and fluid dynamics. The latter area was especially important for the development of atomic weapons at Los Alamos, and it is still true that a large portion of the supercomputing capacity of the United States is concentrated at weapons development laboratories such as Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.

Type
Part XIII. Computer Simulations in the Physical Sciences
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 496 - 506
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1991

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Footnotes

1

Research for this paper was supported by NSF grant DIR-8911393. I should like to thank Fritz Rohrlich for helpful discussions in connection with the PSA symposium

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