Question: Edd: how do you know that the computer predictions will be accurate?

Edward Codling answered on 22 Jun 2011:

Great question antonio!

The computer simulations I do are basically like a computer game where we control the rules. Of course, what this means is that we can pretty much do anything we want (as in a computer game). What we have to do is make sure that our simulations are realistic by trying to put in realistic rules of behaviour for our virtual animals. However, often this is difficult as we may not have the information we need. We can still make progress but we then have to be very careful to check the predictions from the computer against real experiments. The computer simulations on their own wouldn’t be much use – we have to use them alongside data collected from real experiments.

The real experiments we are doing at the moment involve coral reef fish like Nemo, plankton (small bugs that live in the sea) and also human crowds. In each case we did some computer simulations and made predictions before then testing these predictions in our real experiments. Sometimes the simulations and experiments match and our predictions are confirmed. Other times the experiments don’t match our simulation predictions and then we have to go back and change the simulation to make it more realistic.