That is true. Aside from the difficulty in simulating such systems, it is also hard to do an actual experiment that will correspond exactly to your simulation.
Furthermore, a model is exactly what it is-- an approximation of your actual complex system. There would be some details that would be left out to simplify the model while keeping the interesting phenomena intact.
Using an actual system like the ping-pong experiment would still be an approximation to an actual avalanche but it provides a reasonably controllable situation and a level of detail that would be accessible to the investigators. And it generally would proceed much faster than simulating it in a computer.
We were in a similar situation in a research involving
escape panic dynamics where the behaviour of agents (read: people) moving out of an enclosure were looked into. This would be akin to looking at the exit dynamics of people in a fire or in a football stadium in a a riot.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe they thought bin laden was there!
or george w.
That's why intelligent people tend to avoid such battles in the first place...
or a missing 'r'. wasn't that supposed to be surge?
suing RIAA might get some media points but will not change the whole situation of using copyrights to extract more profits for a few corporations.
Furthermore, a model is exactly what it is-- an approximation of your actual complex system. There would be some details that would be left out to simplify the model while keeping the interesting phenomena intact.
Using an actual system like the ping-pong experiment would still be an approximation to an actual avalanche but it provides a reasonably controllable situation and a level of detail that would be accessible to the investigators. And it generally would proceed much faster than simulating it in a computer.
We were in a similar situation in a research involving escape panic dynamics where the behaviour of agents (read: people) moving out of an enclosure were looked into. This would be akin to looking at the exit dynamics of people in a fire or in a football stadium in a a riot.
We did simulate escape panic but later on we used mice to look at the models in a real system. It turns out that the model reasonably gets some of the features of the dynamics but would miss out on things not explicitly included in the model, like herding behavior.