SimExplosion

Today Jeff showed me some of what the Tech Guys have been doing with the new hardware/software package they got to do simulation and modeling. You can model just about anything with this package if you know the equations, and it has a bunch of stuff like particle tracking and weather forecasting already built in. One of the built-in tools is for nuclear detonations... we don't have much use for it, but it's "fun to play with". You set up a model of a city (most of the major U.S. cities are already modeled) and detonate a nuke of a certain size and the package simulates the explosion for you... which buildings vaporize and which explode and which crumble and which are still standing and from that you would presumably formulate a strategy for evacuation or emergency response. Depending on how much time you have, you can really refine it to the point where you have people in the buildings and cars on the street and things of that nature, which adds all sorts of complexity when it's time to make things explode... the more objects in the simulation, the longer it takes to complete. According to Jeff, the software is so well-written that it doesn't waste a cycle of computing time... but it was always the hardware that was the "gating factor", so the simulations were limited and the output was text-based. Now that the hardware has improved, he can do all sorts of crazy things with it, including rendering everything into crude 3-D video, which seems to have become a pastime of the sim team.

See, Jeff was fiddling around with it one day, and found out that the explosions don't necessarily have to be nuclear, and they don't even have to be that big. He figured out how to model smaller explosions like C-4 or just a regular old grenade. He built a room around it and started putting objects in the room... a lot of them had to be built from scratch, like tables and chairs, but people were already available. So he puts a bunch of tables and chairs in a room, then tosses in a grenade, and tells the machine to render it. Then he and Keith and Andy go off and pick up lunch, and when they come back they sit and watch a bunch of bodies pinball around the room as the bomb goes off. Jeff notes that it is especially funny when the room is made very small and packed with way too many people.

He calls it "SimExplosion".

Well, he showed it to me today and while he was in near hysterics watching some poor Sim's head bounce off a wall, I asked him, "Would it be possible to figure out where in the room a person should go in order to receive the least damage from an explosive?" Jeff blinked a couple of times, and then followed with a slow "Yeah... I guess." See, that's the sort of thing I'm interested in... not dying. I immediate sent him off to start figuring that out. Of course, there's no way to model a room properly without knowing about it beforehand, but I'm having Jeff write up a script that will generate a thousand or so different rooms of varying sizes and contents, model them all, and then write up a report to the effect of "Get behind a table", "Use someone as a human shield", or even "You're pretty much screwed no matter what."

He wasn't too excited when I gave him the task... for the most part it's what he was doing before, only now it's work instead of playtime. He did cheer up a bit when I told him I would need extensive details about potential blood loss and damage to specific body parts. I don't know if any of this is going to be useful, but I figure we have a support staff, we should probably use them for something other than keeping dust off the PS2.