A computer model is natural. Computer modeling is used everywhere, making the design and production of real systems, machines, mechanisms, goods, products economical, practical, efficient. The result always exceeds expectations that were previously modeled.
Man has always built models, but with the advent of computer technology, mathematical, computational and software methods have raised the ideas and technologies of modeling to an extraordinary height, made a wide range of their application: from the primitive technical level to the level of high art and creativity.
A computer model is not only a more advanced spaceship or conceptual system for understanding public consciousness, but also a real opportunity to assess climate change on the planet or to determine the consequences of a comet's fall after several hundred years.
Technical modeling
Today, few specialists do not know what AutoCAD is. And the competition for this program is already a dozen more advanced solutions.
Modeling a modern airplane or bicycle ultimately requires not only automation of the production of drawings and preparation of documentation. The simulation program must do the technical part: draw up drawings and documentation - this is the foundation.
The program must also show the real product in real time use in three-dimensional space: in flight, in motion, in use, including probable accidents, replacement of energy, negative effects of man or nature, corrosion, climate or other circumstances.
System modeling
The model of a machine, product, conveyor is a system, but a system of a clear structure and content, once made. For each, there is experience, knowledge and examples of the use of computer models.
Technical reality is the same system as the system of relations in society, the advertising campaign system, the human psyche model, or his circulatory system.
For example, a reliable diagnosis of the disease today can be obtained as:
- the result of competent physician actions;
- output of a computer program that built a model of the patient’s state.
These two options are increasingly leading to the same result.
A person lives in a world of systems, and these systems require decision-making for which basic data are needed: understanding and perception of the surrounding reality. Without modeling, it is impossible to understand the nature of systems and make a decision.
Only a computer mathematical model makes it possible to evaluate the objectivity and level of understanding of the original system, gradually bringing the created virtual image closer to the original.
Abstraction in modeling
Computer models and modeling are an extremely promising and dynamically developing field of technology. Here, high-tech solutions are a familiar (ordinary, daily) event, and the capabilities of models and modeling amaze any sophisticated imagination.
However, man has not yet reached the abstract system modeling. Examples of the use of computer models are real examples of real systems. For each direction of modeling, for each type of model, each type of product, conveyor, etc., there is a separate program or its own separate item in the program menu that provides modeling in a relatively wide range of systems.
Software tools themselves are models. The result of the work of a programmer is always a model. A good program or a good one, but it is always a model for solving a specific problem, which receives the initial data and forms the result.
Classical programming - classical models, no abstraction: an exact task without dynamics options after its development. It’s like a real machine, a real product, any product with strict quantitative and qualitative characteristics: done - use it within the limits of the available, but nothing beyond the limits of what has been done.
Object-oriented programming is a system model with a claim to abstraction and the dynamics of structure and properties, that is, with an orientation toward creating a dynamic model that determines its purpose by the application environment or the task to be solved.
Here the model can “live” after it is in the field of application alone without its creator (author) and will independently “cooperate” with users.
Modeling: the essence of the process
The concept of a computer model today is represented by different versions of opinions, but they all agree that this is the result of the program, and in the context: the model is equal to the result of the actions of a specialist who works in the specific modeling environment of a particular program.
There are three types of models: cognitive, pragmatic and instrumental.
In the first case, the modeling aspect is most expressed as the desire to obtain a model in the format of the embodiment of knowledge, knowledge of theory, global process. Pragmatic model - gives an idea of the practical actions of the worker, the production management system, product, machine tool. The third option is understood as an environment for constructing, analyzing, and testing all models in general.
Typically, computer modeling is the activity of a specialist in the construction and study of a material or ideal (virtual) object that replaces the system under study, but adequately reflects its essential aspects, qualitative and quantitative characteristics.
Species diversity of simulated systems
In the field of modeling, as at all the advanced lines of high technology, science, technology and programming, there are many opinions on the classification and determination of the species diversity of simulated systems.
But experts and experts always agree on one thing: types of computer models can be determined by objective points:
- time;
- presentation method;
- the nature of the simulated side;
- level of uncertainty;
- an implementation option.
The time moment is a static and dynamic model. The former can be specified as much as you like, but dynamic models are developing, and at each moment of time they are different. The presentation method is usually understood as discrete or continuous. The nature of the modeled side is informational, structural, or functional (cybernetic).
The introduction of uncertainty parameters into the simulated system is in many cases not only justified, but also a consequence of scientific achievements in related branches of knowledge. For example, building a climate model in a particular geographic region would not be possible without many stochastic factors.
Modern modeling tools
Modeling today is a vast experience of many decades of development of the computer industry, which presented in the form of algorithms and programs many centuries of modeling, in general, and mathematical modeling, in particular.
Popular software tools are represented by a small family of products widely known: AutoCAD, 3D Max, Wings 3D, Blender 3D, SketchUp. Based on these products, there are many special implementations.
In addition to the well-known, there is a significant private, for example, the market of geographical, cartographic, geodesic; the film and video industry market, represented by a significant number of little-known software products. The families of GeoSoft, TEPLOV, Houdini and others in their sphere of competence are inferior to few in quality, usefulness and efficiency.
When choosing the best software tool, the best solution is to evaluate the area of the proposed modeling, the environment of the future model. This will allow you to determine the necessary tools.
Small and creative models
And although “there is little creativity” in the design of a modern airbus, sports car or spacecraft, in fact, programming and organizing business processes have become the subject of close attention and the goal for the most expensive and complex modeling processes.
Modern business is not only hundreds of employees, pieces of equipment, but also thousands of production and social ties within and outside the company. This is a completely new and unexplored area: cloud technology, organization of privileged access, protection against malicious attacks, illegal employee actions.
Modern programming has become too complex and has turned into a black box of a special kind, moreover, living its own life. A software product created by one development team is set for modeling and learning for another development company.
Authoritative example
You can imagine a Windows system or the Linux family as a subject of modeling and force someone to build adequate models. The practical significance here is so low that it’s cheaper to just work and not pay attention to the disadvantages of these systems. Their developer has his own idea of the development path he needs, and he is not going to turn off it.
The opposite can be said about databases and their development dynamics. Oracle is a large company. Many ideas, thousands of developers, hundreds of thousands of perfected solutions.
But Oracle is, first of all, the foundation and a powerful reason for modeling, and it seems that investments in this process will have an amazing payback.
Oracle has taken the lead from the very beginning and has not been inferior to anyone in the field of creating databases, ensuring a responsible attitude to information, its protection, migration, storage, etc. All that is required to service information tasks is Oracle.
The flip side of Oracle
Investments and the work of the best developers to solve the urgent task is an objective necessity. Over the decades of its leadership, Oracle has performed hundreds of actual tasks, and thousands - of implementations and updates.
The scope of information in the context of computer applications from the 80s to this day has not changed. Conceptually, the databases of the beginning of the computer era and today are twin brothers with a difference in the level of security and implemented functionality.
To achieve the modern level of “security and implemented functionality”, Oracle performed, in particular:
- compatibility of large flows of heterogeneous information;
- data migration and transformation;
- verification and testing of applications;
- generalized relational universal access functional;
- data / specialist migration;
- transformation of the fundamental foundations of corporate databases into a distributed Internet environment;
- maximum integration, aggregators, systematization;
- determination of the spectrum of expediency, elimination of duplicate processes.
This is only a fraction of those that compose multi-volume descriptions of existing software products from Oracle. In fact, the range of manufactured solutions is much wider and more powerful. All of them are supported by Oracle and thousands of qualified professionals.
Revenue model
If Oracle went to modeling in the 80s, rather than concrete capacity building in the form of real, complete solutions, the situation would have turned out significantly different. By and large, a person or an enterprise does not need so much from a computer information system. The study of a computer model is not of interest here.
You always need to get only a solution to the problem. How this decision will be received, the consumer never cares. He is completely uninterested in knowing what data migration is or how to test the application code so that it works on any data, and in case of an emergency could calmly report it, and not make the blue screen or silently hang.
By modeling the next need programmatically, and not by investing in the next specialist who will put his mind and knowledge to create the next piece of code, you can achieve more.
Any, the best specialist is, first of all, a static code, this is fixing the best knowledge in the format of a monument to the author. This is just a code. The result of the work of the best does not develop, but for its development it requires new developers, new authors.
The probability of the implementation of the revenue model
The developers and the field of IT technologies, in general, have already ceased to be enthusiastic about dynamics, knowledge and artificial intelligence, which were accompanied by waves of interest of past years.
Purely formal, many associate their products or areas of work with the topic of artificial intelligence, but, in fact, are engaged in the implementation of strictly defined algorithms, cloud solutions, attach importance to security and protection against all kinds of threats.
Meanwhile, the computer model is dynamics. Computer modeling is its consequences. This objective circumstance has not yet been canceled. It is completely impossible to cancel. The Oracle example is the best and most illustrative of others, and it shows how laborious, expensive and inefficient it is to engage in forced modeling, when you have to build really working models by the labor of many thousands of specialists, and not automatically by the very designed information system - models in dynamics in real practice!