User-friendly language for programming efficient simulations
Computer simulations of physical systems are common in science, engineering, and entertainment, but they use several different types of tools. If, say, you want to explore how a crack forms in an airplane wing, you need a very precise physical model of the crack’s immediate vicinity. But if you want to simulate the flexion of an airplane wing under different flight conditions, it’s more practical to use a simpler, higher-level description of the wing. If, however, you want to model the effects of wing flexion on the crack’s propagation, or vice versa, you need to switch back and forth between these two levels of description, which is difficult not only for computer programmers but for computers, too. A team of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Adobe, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Toronto, Texas A&M, and the University of Texas have developed a new programming language...