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Mining Companies Borrow From Gamers' Physics Engines
littlekorea writes "Mining companies are developing new systems for automating blasting of iron ore using the same open source physics engines adapted for games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. The same engine that determines 3D collision detection and soft body/rigid body dynamics in gaming will be applied to building 3D blast movement models — which will predict where blasted materials will land and distinguish between ore and waste. Predictive blast fragmentation models used in the past have typically been either numerical or empirical, [mining engineer Alan Cocker] said. Numerical models such as discrete element method, he noted, are onerous to configure and demanding of resources — both computing and human — and are generally not appropriate for operational use at mines. 'The problem with empirical models, by contrast, is that they tend to operate at a scale too coarse to give results useful for optimizations,' he added, noting typical Kuz-Ram-based fragmentation models (PDF) (widely used to estimate fragmentation from blasting) assume homogeneous geology (the same type of materials) throughout a blast."
Is about to shit his fucking pants.
Totally pwned the earth's crust with this frag.
It sounds like they just want to play Minecraft!
This is rather notable in that it's the first article I've seen in a while that talks about both GPU-compute and mining without being about Bitcoin.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Movies like 2012, and just about every single open source project that needs a physics engine uses it. (sorry ODE and Newton, but bullet is better)
I guess where speed and (digital) resource optimization has been the name of the game for years, so to speak, it should be no surprise that game engines have applications other than keeping neckbeards from scratching their zits.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Cause the physics in video games are mostly there for looks and are highly inaccurate
Guess the physics engines are pretty life like when they start using them to predict real world interactions...
adapted for games such as Grand Theft Auto IV
1) Blast the rock into pieces.
2) Slap the pieces until the metal falls out.
3) Profit!
The engine name is Bullet and it's pretty good to work with. I have done some AR stuff with it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpBL6eqcJ6A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnaIVvNKjek
I figured they used Boulderdash.
Mountaintop removal, powered by Unreal technology.
or
If you use cryengine, you can move mountains.
Silence is a state of mime.
As awesome as Bullet is as a physics engine, it was meant for realtime gaming to precise simulation.
The Cray of the late 90's was only as powerful as a top end gaming PC today. A Tesla class GPU can do 4.5 Teraflops at single precision, even 1.3 tflops at double precision.
When you see a game calculate the physics of particles in a tube, that's the same calculations that were done as a simulation by previous generations of supercomputers.
This would have been done YEARS ago if there weren't a financial driver discouraging it.
Were the gaming companies unwilling to license, or was there an agreement with some other company to use their tools and resources to accomplish the task of blasting effectively (probably affecting the price point of their tools) that did not allow for external influences (software), or was..............?
...or approximations of it. For this kind of simulations, there are are tools that are better, where "better" means more accurate, reliable and reproducible. Finite elements, for example, is one of them. Everything else is just horse manure covered with M&M's.