In my work as a software engineer in aerospace R&D I use what is arguably the most sophisticated, universally applicable, finite-element analysis program ever devised by the most brilliant people in field, refined and tested for 35 years since its inception in the mid-1970s for the development of variable-yield nuclear weapons at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is called LS-DYNA (LS for Livermore Software, and DYNA for the evaluation of dynamic, nonlinear, transient systems). A finite element is an attempt to descretize on a macro level what occurs at a molecular level in a physical system, so that a result is amenable to a practical computational solution. The learning curve for the use of this sophisticated technology is extremely steep, … Continue reading FEA and Darwinian Computer Simulations