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Mining Companies Borrow From Gamers' Physics Engines

Posted by Soulskill on from the experts-in-blowing-things-up dept.

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."

5 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Did hell just freeze over? by jhantin · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Did hell just freeze over? by jhantin · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      You just invoked jhantin's law....

      I have my own law now? News to me. But I was talking about the articles linked from the story, not the comments.

      --
      ...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
  2. Re:I hope they do their math by wierd_w · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mostly that has to do with incorrect/inappropriate weights being assigned to gameworld objects.

    Many world objects weight exactly the same as styrofoam, but somehow have enough kinetic energy when thrown to instagib the bad guy. Others are made to weigh 100x that of lead, but somehow actually get tossed by an explosion instead of simply pushed a little.

    If they plug in sane values for mass, center of mass, "bounciness", elasticity, inertia, and gravity, the should get mostly useful simulations. Issues with air pressure (it is an enclosed space, with an explosive charge, after all) might cause problems, but adapting it with another added value as a delta to object vectors (with a fall off radius) would fix it somewhat.

  3. Re:Captain Planet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    We can model that too.

  4. The engine name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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