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ASCI White Detonates The First E-Bomb 566

Posted by Hemos from the ka-WHAM dept.
totallygeek writes "Redefining the term vaporware, research scientists at Lost Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Labs detonated two computer simulations. ASCI White, the world's fastest supercomputer, ran the simulations of nuclear explosions. Scientists can now study nuclear weapon replacement components without violating the nuclear test ban, in effect since 1992. Each simulation used more than 6.6 million CPU hours, which would take home machines 1000 years to complete. The data for each experiment was equivalent to 35 times the information available in the Library of Congress. ASCI White currently operates at 12 teraflops, but by early next year, Los Alamos expects to operate at 30 teraflops. The seven month research project ended last Friday, and now the system is ready for use, after its sucessful testing."
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ASCI White Detonates The First E-Bomb More

ASCI White Detonates The First E-Bomb

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  • Might as well bet this out of the way: (Score:3, Funny)

    by blankmange ( 571591 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:16PM (#3304582)
    Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.....

  • Someone... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:17PM (#3304589)
    set up us the bomb!
  • But who needs a simulation? If you have an Athlon, just jiggle the fan off and watch the thing in real life!

  • wired (Score:2, Interesting)

    by yellowjacket03 ( 470997 )
    there was an interesting article in Wired a couple of months ago. It said that very few of our scientists working on nuclear projects had first hand experience with actual testing. I guess this can bring the newer guys up to speed.

  • Whoa... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:20PM (#3304604)
    Makes you wonder what the government has that its /not/ telling us about... heh
  • What IS the sound of a 12-teraflop machine crashing with the power of 20 megatons? :)

    Oh wait, their massive-parallel (Beowulf cluster, if you will) was probably running AIX, [ibm.com] nevermind.

    But it would be nice to see the "fallout" of such a huge bluescreen.

    (-1, Bad pun.)

  • Great Advances (Score:5, Funny)

    by stevenbee ( 227371 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:21PM (#3304610)
    I must say this ASCII stuff has come a long way since the days of the dial-up BBS.

    : )

  • It's a good start, but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by fobbman ( 131816 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:21PM (#3304613) Homepage
    ...I wonder if they could answer a question for me. Will it really only be cockroaches and Keith Richards that would live through a nuclear war?

    • Some of the simulation results indicate that, in addition to cockroaches and Keith Richards, the following items will survive thermonuclear war:

      1) an incredible number of AOL CDs. The exact number is to be determined via further testing of ASCI White, once it's reached further performance milestones.

      2) Lawyers and Insurance salespeople. (see also: cockroaches)

      Next up: Damnation Alley scenarios, yeehaw!
  • Whooo hooo! Way to go RS/6000! Just another notch in the blade of the RISC vs. CISC debate. (And no, I'm not trolling for either side!)

    So when I head down to the lab and hunch over the network code for my rs6k machines I can think "these machines are the bomb!"

    It'll make me feel better when I crash them with my device drivers.
  • But does it play pong?

  • SETI@home (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Partisan01 ( 547933 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:22PM (#3304626) Homepage
    I wonder what the computing power of SETI@home is. Could such a thing be done with a distributed system across home machines? If a program like this was run on people's computers who had broadband it might be possible to do something similar. The military could even use a system such as this. Since no one has all the program data no secrets would be let out. Everyone is just doing small computations that a larger computer somewhere puts together to make something useful. Hmm......

    • Re:SETI@home (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 0xB ( 568582 )
      Can you break this sort of problem down that easily? I would think there is too much interdependency between cells - which would mean a lot of communication needed across the network.
      • Can you break this sort of problem down that easily? I would think there is too much interdependency between cells - which would mean a lot of communication needed across the network.

        Not only that, but unlike SETI@Home, each calculation is dependent on the data generated by the previous set of calculations. S@H is just crunching blocks looking for data, much like D.net.

        The nuclear simulations require an immense amount of data to be continuously generated as you go through each millisecond of the explosion. Or nanosecond? However small you need each time dataframe to be in nuclear physics.

    • Re:SETI@home (Score:5, Informative)

      by spullara ( 119312 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:34PM (#3304742) Homepage
      It's pretty easy to find out what the computing power of Seti@Home is, just check the totals [berkeley.edu] to find that in the last 24 hours, on average, the computer was running at 96.79 teraflops. Only 8x that of ASCI White.

    • Re:SETI@home (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Unlike SETI@home, simulating an explosion is NOT suited for massive parallelism. The equations are partial differential equations in space and time. Very roughly speaking, to compute the speed, density, etc. of the exploding gas ball at a later time requires you to use information of the speed, density, etc. at an earlier time and at ALL spaces. You can distribute the spatial data over, say, 1024 processors, but anything more than that, the communication costs increase and you get speed degrading. In short, the nature of the equations governing the explosion imposes a restriction on the number of parallel processors you can use.

    • Re:SETI@home (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mblase ( 200735 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:43PM (#3304827)
      I wonder what the computing power of SETI@home is. Could such a thing be done with a distributed system across home machines? Hmm. Should I download a distributed computing client to...
      1. analyze the human genome,
      2. fold cancer-curing proteins,
      3. locate possible sources of alien intelligence, or
      4. help the government explode a virtual nuke?
      (No nastiness intended. My point is that it might be hard to get people to download a client with that particular goal in mind.)
    • So, what would the screen saver look like? a BSOD?

    • Re:SETI@home (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bm_luethke ( 253362 ) <luethkeb@nOspam.comcast.net> on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:50PM (#3304876)
      there are several issues that would preclude this type of computation being run in a SETI@home context. First broadband is very slow compared to what the interconnects on these clusters run. The small 64 node cluster we run has gig-ether on a non-blocking 64 port foundary switch - still slower than what is on the proprietary IBM sp machines. Even with that fast of an interconnect these types of computations tend to be i/o bound.

      Also data size would be a contributing factor. In many of the gasseous simulations we run it is not uncommon to have multi-gigabyte data sets (in fact we have even had more than one request for multi-terabyte storage - we didn't have that much on the entier cluster). Not only is this hard to transfer/maintain in a timely manner on a broadband connection the home users machine would have trouble with it. Most hard drives out there could withstand it even when full of mp3's but you also have to take into account what data needs in memory at one time. Most new computation clusters have at least a gig of high speed ram in them and it is still not really enough.

      And lastly as far a secrets go, you will not need the entier data set to glean information from the data. Just the algorithms used to process the data may be classified (if they simulate our nuclear weapons well enough you will probably learn something classified about thier construction).

      oh, yea, unless the algorithm in question is ridicuosly parrallel there is a lot more going on than small computations that a larger computer puts together going on. Computations such as SETI@home are a very narrow type of distributed computation and does not occur very frequently.

    • Re:SETI@home (Score:5, Insightful)

      by astroboy ( 1125 ) <ljdursi@gmail.com> on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:51PM (#3304885) Homepage
      SETI@home can't be used for things like this, as it turns out.

      Running programs in parallel is pretty difficult; you have to figure out how to divide the problem amongst different processors. Some problems (which are said to be `embarrassingly parallel') are easy to do this -- every different processor just searches a different part of key-space for a key to decrypt a code, or a different part of frequency-space looking for a signal. There doesn't have to be any sort of inter-process communication to speak of in these problems.

      A fluids or mechanical (or combined) simulation, however, requires lots of communication between computational elements. Each processor is simulating some region of space, and it constantly needs information about the fluid all around it to know what to do next. (Is a shock wave coming from the left?)

      And even fluids/mechanics simulations are simpler than simulations involving long-range forces like gravity. In that case, every single computational element probably needs at least some information from every other computational element!

      In cases like that, highly-distributed computing a la SETI@home won't work. Whereas for brute-force code-cracking, or searching for signals in reams of indepdendant data, it's perfect.

  • This gives me bad flashbacks of "War Games" for some reason. I sure hope ASCI White sucks at tic tac toe.

    Maybe we could talk them into running a Medal of Honor: Allied Assualt? They could bill is as a "stratigic nazi slaying simulation".

  • so when they said the system was "da bomb" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TechnoVooDooDaddy ( 470187 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:23PM (#3304632) Homepage
    they weren't kidding....

    seriously tho, 30teraflops is impressive... we need to put this to work on the cancer research projects as well.. can't let the nuke boys have all the fun..

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I love marketing text (Score:4, Funny)

    by sahala ( 105682 ) <sahalaNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:24PM (#3304640)
    ...and capable of solving in one second what a human being with a calculator would need 10 million years to figure out.

    Obviously within a limited problem scope that the machine would be good at. I just wish they were a bit more explicit about this so that non-techies won't tell me how they're worried that machines will be watching them and manipulating them ala-HAL all of a sudden.

    Then again why would a non-techie even browse to that page anyway? Never mind.

  • Am I the only one... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rayonic ( 462789 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:24PM (#3304645) Homepage Journal
    Who saw the headline and thought that they had finally invented giant EMP-bombs, a-la science fiction?
  • There's supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom.

  • First 3D simulation... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:26PM (#3304660)
    I think the original subject for this post was a bit misleading. This was the first 3d simulation of a nuclear explosion. There have been many previous simulations of nuclear explosions, only they were limited to 2d plots of data. Nuclear explosion and fallout simulation has been the major purpose of supercomputing at Livermore and Los Alamos for decades.
    • There have been many previous simulations of nuclear explosions, only they were limited to 2d plots of data

      That's right. They were also only simulations of the first few miliseconds of the detonation IIRC.
  • Man, we humans are hellbent on seeing how destructive we can be. We can't go out and blow things up, so we sit around and spend thousands of man-hours on figuring out a way to simulate massive destruction...why not just play Quake 3 Arena?
    I'm sorry, but running a computer simulation can't be as satisfying as seeing something you've created cause a REAL mushroom cloud...even at the expense of growing an extra eye and a tail.
    • a REAL mushroom cloud...* SNIP* why not just play Quake 3 Arena?

      Because the Kamikaze (giant nuclear explosion to kill yourself and all around you)wasn't introduced into Q3 until the Team Arena expansion pack?

      :)

    • > I'm sorry, but running a computer simulation can't be as satisfying as seeing something you've created cause a REAL mushroom cloud...even at the expense of growing an extra eye and a tail.

      Well, sure, but that just means ACSI White needs a better video card to render it :-)

      Hmm, 30 teraflops, huh? OK, assuming Moore's Law holds up, who's up for requesting that Doom VIII having a "REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, WE MEAN IT, YOU DON'T WANNA USE IT, NO MATTER HOW COOL IT LOOKS, BFG"? :-)

  • Other uses? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by qubezz ( 520511 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:27PM (#3304666)
    At 12.28 teraflops, one wonders how quickly this machine can render 128 bit encryption useless... After all, the defense department has other uses besides simulating explosions, I would think...

    • Re:Other uses? (Score:4, Informative)

      by sylvester ( 98418 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @03:38PM (#3305213) Homepage
      Well, assuming that these were in fact teradops (tera-decrypt-operations-per-second) then:

      2^128 ~= 3.4 x 10^38

      1 tera = 1 x 10^12

      3.4 x 10^38 / 1 x 10^12 = 3.4 x 10^26 seconds.

      10^26 seconds / 86400 seconds/day / 365 days/year ~= 1.1 x 10^19 years = 11,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to brute force 128 bit encryption.

      but wait, there's more! in fact, you'll probably find the key after only half of the keyspace has been examine, which is a mere 5,500,000,000,000,000,000 years.

      I'd say it'll be a while yet.

  • A Taste of Armageddon... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cqnn ( 137172 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:28PM (#3304676)

    The title of the Star Trek episode where warring
    planets conducted battles completely thru computer
    simulation. This advance takes us closer to that
    future possibilty.

    But, instead of modeling Nuclear detonations, I
    think the interests of warfare could also be served by setting up an ASCI White as a massive
    international UT server, and let national conflicts be settled by a nice game of capture
    the flag.

    Best two out of three?
  • If I may make a suggestion, I would like to see this beast of a super-computer used to assist the SETI@home project...

    With this thing's horsepower I would expect to have conclusive findings of extra terrestial life within a matter of weeks and be shaking hands with E.T. by the end of summer... :-)

    Also, I must throw in the obligatory comment of "wouldn't you just love a beowulf cluster of these things...".

  • This article was posted not long ago... (Score:4, Informative)

    by SevenTowers ( 525361 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:29PM (#3304686) Homepage
    Consistency please HERE [slashdot.org]

  • Anyone else read that wrong? (Score:4, Funny)

    by pangur ( 95072 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:31PM (#3304703)
    I read the headline as "ASCII white detonated the first E-bomb"

    Wait... ASCII, dumb terminals, email bombs, endless buzzers...it's all coming back to me now.

    Isn't this out of date? Next will be "Mainframe successfully runs up to ten users on terminals"

    Oh, wait, nuclear bombs simulations. Ok. Never mind. Sorry.
  • I'll do the obligatory "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" joke, shall I?

  • and yet (Score:3, Informative)

    by Edmund Blackadder ( 559735 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:31PM (#3304707)
    Congress did not ratify the nuclear test ban treaty.

    The only way i can explain this is that some people actually want other countries to develop nuclear capabilities. Which is not that far fetched actually.

    • The only way i can explain this is that some people actually want other countries to develop nuclear capabilities.

      I don't fear any counrty that developes it's own nuclear bomb - a cretain amount of civilisation is required in order to achieve such a feat. It's he countries/groups that buy their nukes that scare me.

      The same corelation can be made with guns - it's not the hunter that can make his own rounds that you should fear, it's the street thug that traded his welfare check for a "saturday night special" that will wind up killing somebody.

      • a cretain amount of civilisation

        Iraq has a cretin amount of civilization. Doesn't that worry you?

      • civilization? (Score:4, Funny)

        by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @03:16PM (#3305063) Journal

        I don't fear any counrty that developes it's own nuclear bomb - a cretain amount of civilisation is required in order to achieve such a feat.

        Specifically, you need Nuclear Power and Rocketry, plus you need to build the Manhattan Project. Except the damn Mongols keep put SDI Defense everywhere.

  • It may stop the US from pulling out of another treaty but it only increases the chance that nuclear weapons will be used by and/or against them.

    Nuclear proliferation will not improve your lives in any way. It has a good chance of making you paranoid and miserable, and a very small chance of killing you and everyone you care about.
    • MAD seems to have worked so far.
      It doesn't create nuclear bombs, it allows people to
      a:build cleaner bombs. IF someone is going to use the bomb, they will use the bomb, with or without this simulation. Quite frankly, I'd rather they used a clean bomb, perferable air burst.
      b:Help us figure out whats going on with our aging nuclear weapon.

      b:
  • Now, how much processor time do they need to help the e-terminators to protect e-John Conner from the e-Robot Holocaust?

    Or prevent e-David Banner from turning into the e-Hulk?

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by realgone ( 147744 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:36PM (#3304757)
    Greenpeace immediately responded by running simulations of anti-nuke protests on an old 486 sitting on a card table outside Lawrence Livermore Labs.

  • 12 teraflops (Score:3, Funny)

    by the_2nd_coming ( 444906 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:36PM (#3304761) Homepage
    so what, it still takes 1 min to process a web request simultainiusly for every man, woman and child on earth...its not that great :-)

  • progress (Score:2)

    by trb ( 8509 )
    Nice to see that the masters of war have found a way to develop their implements of destruction without resorting to messy nuke tests that could harm children or other living things. Will they have stickers that say, "No animals were harmed in the development of this warhead?" I hope the folks at peta are happy about this.
  • The fact that this was the sane option says a lot about the US, and little of it is good.

    There's no point in improving our nuclear arsenal if we're not prepared to use it. This is NOT the message we want to send out to the rest of the world!

    There are sound engineering/technical reasons, which military tech buffs are fond of pointing out, why it would be safe/acceptable to make controlled use of nuclear weapons. The military tech buffs are probably right as far as that goes, which isn't very far. If we're serious about controlling the proliferation of suitcase nukes we have to act multilaterally.

    Improving our nuke arsenal - especially after the foreign press has been filled with ill conceived threats/discussions of the possibility that we might use it - is shameful and stupid. We can intimidate the rest of the world into going along with us in public; we don't even need our military might to do that (although it does help), our economic clout is sufficient to scare the pants off of anyone with anything to lose.

    What we need, not just to defend ourselves, but to enrich ourselves, to enhance our prestige and enrich our increasingly-international culture, is international good will.

    Designing and building thermonuke depthcharges, bunkerbusters and tactical neutron bombs is NOT the way to go about that. If we're not going to build the things, we shouldn't waste the resources designing them.
    • > There's no point in improving our nuclear arsenal if we're not prepared to use it. This is NOT the message we want to send out to the rest of the world!

      Well, duh. There's no point in even maintaining (let alone improving!) a nuclear arsenal unless you're prepared to use it.

      Look up "Deterrence".

      We have a nuclear arsenal. We've maintained it for 50 years. And we've stated (for the better part of those 50 years), under what conditions we are prepared to use it.

      > Designing and building thermonuke depthcharges, bunkerbusters and tactical neutron bombs is NOT the way to go about that. If we're not going to build the things, we shouldn't waste the resources designing them.

      Eminently true -- I conclude, therefore, that we are going to design them, or at least do as much of the design work as possible, so that if we decide we need to build them, we can do so at a moment's notice.

      That's not being rash, that's being prudent.

      > What we need, not just to defend ourselves, but to enrich ourselves, to enhance our prestige and enrich our increasingly-international culture, is international good will.

      Peace in our time, eh?

      Dude, what's it like, chanelling the spirit of Neville Chamberlain? :-)

  • Rods to the hogshead... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by seanadams.com ( 463190 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:42PM (#3304810) Homepage
    The data for each experiment was equivalent to 35 times the information available in the Library of Congress.

    The Library of Congress was an interesting comparison back when CD-ROM drives were first becoming popular 10 years ago, and laymen had no clue about the storage capabilities of computers. Now it's just plain stupid.

    Imagine if hard drives were specd in KLOCs - thousands of libraries of congress. :)
  • Quite a few people have quoted the Teraflops/sec of Seti@home for comparision, perhaps suggesting that there is a better way of attacking these sorts of problems. I think if this sort of problem were amenable to a "widely distributed" computing attack we'd already all be running a covert client as part of our new windows XP installation (at least us windows users).

    Simulating nuclear explosions however is the sort of problem that requires the generation of massive amounts of data and intensive communications between computing nodes. Not something that's going to work well over a dialup connection...

    -josh
  • This kind of software if it would escape the lab (and the past has proven more than enough that anything that can escape will escape, remember those missing harddrives) combined with the pc's that you can buy at fry's in a few years time will allow any rogue nation to design their own without wisening anybody else because they no longer have to test their stuff in order to reach a high level of confidence that it will work in practice. Now at least we KNOW that Pakistan and India have the bomb (they probably wanted us to know, but there are some that do not want you to know until they hit you).

  • The spirit of the law (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lobsterGun ( 415085 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:55PM (#3304916)
    Now don't take me wrong. I appreciate how much of a technical marvel this is, but ....

    The test ban was enacted so that nations would STOP designing better planet-busters. Now we have shown that it is possible for people to design nukes in thier basement (assuming their basement has a 12 teraflop computer).

    Should we feel any more secure knowing that India and Pakistan can now quietly design better atomic arsenals to annihilate each other with?

    • The test ban was enacted so that nations would STOP designing better planet-busters. Now we have shown that it is possible for people to design nukes in thier basement (assuming their basement has a 12 teraflop computer).

      Should we feel any more secure knowing that India and Pakistan can now quietly design better atomic arsenals to annihilate each other with?

      Unfortunately, there is no way to stop people from being able to perform computing simulations like this without also severely limiting most of their other technology - which would be grossly unethical. This is the same kind of problem as the old "limit the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons" thread that was going around a few years back; to make it impossible for anyone to figure out how to make nuclear weapons, you have to basically condemn them to an early-20th-century knowledge of science forever.

      It's more practical (and more convenient from an ethical standpoint too) just to look for signs of nuclear weapon production. It takes quite a bit of industry to refine the required materials; this can be detected if the watchers are vigilant. You can also detect the required nuclear plants from orbit with the right kind of sensors and a bit of patience (and it would surprise me greatly if the US didn't already have a host of satellites quietly looking for gamma ray glow on the ground).

      Limiting the ability to *design* nuclear weapons also doesn't really limit a nation's ability to *get* nuclear weapons, so I'd argue that the purpose of the test ban treaty is more to prevent escalation between the existing nuclear powers than to prevent new people from gaining nuclear capability.
      • > Limiting the ability to *design* nuclear weapons also doesn't really limit a nation's ability to *get* nuclear weapons,

        I agree with 90% of what you said, so I'll nitpick on the 10%.

        Given enough fissionables, any nation can make something that goes BOOM.

        For any given BOOM, the quantity that constitutes "enough" is directly proportional to the skill of that nation's weapons designers.

        If you're a rogue nation, busily accumulating fissionables for your bombmakers, being stuck with a bad design is gonna delay your bombmaking effort for a few years, and once you have "enough" for a bomb, you won't be able to build as many of 'em.

        Inasmuch as we can observe signs of weapons production, the smaller "enough" is for them, the harder that job is, and the less likely it is that we'll be able to do anything about it before it's Too Late.

        Although it's not enough to stop proliferation, I believe that limiting the ability of rogue nations to improve their weapons design is a significant and ongoing part of nonproliferation.

  • In a 2nd strike, EBCIDIC Detontates its First E-Bomb as a show of strength.

    Then in a further show of strength, UNICODE detonates its first E-bomb.

  • and in 25 years time.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by ZaneMcAuley ( 266747 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @02:59PM (#3304943) Homepage Journal
    The wristwatch you wear will contain many many times more computing power than this :D

  • A Misuse of Compute! (Score:3, Informative)

    by mr_don't ( 311416 ) on Monday April 08, 2002 @03:05PM (#3304987)

    When I was working in a Bacterial Genomics lab, I used to crave faster, more powerful computers to crunch through genomic data. This type of computing power is a dream for bioinformaticists who want to, for example, create targeted cures for bacterial disease based on specific genetic idioms.

    What is unfortunate is that we have an expensive, tax-payer funded processor farm that is dedicated to the useless pursuit of studying weapons of mass destruction. A great text about the myths of US nuclear policy can be found in Michio Kaku's [mkaku.org] (with Dan Axelrod) To Win a Nuclear War [southendpress.org]. It's in the style of a book like "The Hacker Crackdown", well researched, and really interesting.

    If you are interested in stopping Nuclear Weapons Research in the US, another great site is that of Nobel Peace Prize Winning group Intl. Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War [ippnw.org] (IPPNW). I think it's telling to compare IPPNW's site to the Defense Department's Moronic Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team [defenselink.mil] web site!


  • Recursion (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Yoda2 ( 522522 )
    IBM today announced that the company has built the world's fastest supercomputer--capable of 12 trillion calculations per second--more than three times faster than the most powerful computer in existence today.

    If they've already built the thing, how can it be 3x faster than "the most powerful computer in existence today"?

  • How can this be a good test? It can only simulate according to program, and programming will be done according to current theory.

    In other words, it will simply run through a set of possible behaviours that science currently expects of it. Not it's actual behaviour.

    Doing this in the real world might throw up new information that hadn't prevoiusly been predicted. Doing it on a computer seems like an exercise in scientific back-slapping to me.

    Cheers,
    Ian

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