Abstract
Insight and illumination are what we really want from a mathematical model. But when we write equations so complex that they cannot be solved with paper and pencil, we must enter the murky and sometimes dissatisfying world of numerical approximation and computer simulation. In these nether regions, while we grope for pattern among the numbers, a healthy sense of humor is essential, for much of the programming for computer simulation is boring, repetitive, and an impediment to the use of our bright ideas to understand systems and address real-world problems. Clarity, grace, and style are our coding goals, but along the way we face an abundance of arcane input/output minutiae, complex argument passing, and a mass of numbers whose meaning may be obscure at best and undiscoverable at worst. To appreciate this and the alternatives, we first consider the structure of a typical program to simulate finite difference equations.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Haefner, J.W. (1996). Simulation Paradigms. In: Modeling Biological Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4119-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4119-6_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-6847-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-4119-6
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