thisnumbersdisconnected
New Member
Can't find one with just a cursory search, but I know I read it somewhere. Might not have been online. I'll keep trying.
They weren't designed to cheat. They can only work on hard math equations. There is no way a simulator can "simulate chance." For example, a simulator would never, ever produce results of a simulation in which 99 out of 100 coin tosses came up "heads," but it can happen. It's not likely, but the simulator will never produce that result.
Here's the best example I know. Helicopters have flown upside down and survived. Not intentionally, and not for long. But the first-ever public test flight of the UH-1 done before a procurement team from the Pentagon, was nearly a disaster because of a freak thunderstorm that blew over the mountains and engulfed the bird before anyone saw it coming. That was in 1958. They landed the bird, and found only sixteen rivets in the airframe were stretched, and one popped. The Army ordered 1,500 of them.
Get a simulator to produce those conditions? It will not happen. According to the equations that go into the simulator's programing, it's impossible, so it won't reproduce the event that happened to the very first bird publicly flown. Program into the simulator such a thunderstorm appearing unexpectedly, and it crashes the bird 100% of the time.
I just thought of another one. United Air Lines Flight 232, July 19, 1989, bound from Denver to Chicago. The plane suffered catastrophic of the DC-10s tail-mounted third engine. The engine literally disintegrated, throwing shrapnel from interior engine parts all over the aircraft, severing hydraulic lines in all three such systems aboard the aircraft. Capt. Alfred C. Haynes, First Officer William Records, and Second Officer Dudley Dvorak went to work figuring out how to control and uncontrollable aircraft. They were joined by Dennis E. Fitch, an off-duty United Airlines DC-10 flight instructor who was flying first class.
The four settled on shifting the throttles on the two remaining engines, feeding power to the engine opposite any turns they wanted to make. To descend, their only choice was to reduce engine power. They brought the plane in steep and fast at Sioux Gateway Airport in Sioux City, Iowa. That mode was the only choice they had given the spaghetti the explosion had rendered of their systems, and when the plane landed, it broke in two, rolled, and the remaining two engines burst into flames. The crash killed 111 of the 296 people on board, but miraculously the crew all survived, along with 181 others. The reality is, everyone on board should have died.
The FAA, Douglas and United all tried to duplicate the maneuvers the four pilots used to bring the plane over 150 air miles from where the engine exploded, to the airport. No simulation succeeded. Every single one indicated the plane should have crashed and killed everyone. But it didn't.
Then there's Sully Sullenberger. 'Nuf said.
The "Let's Make A Deal" simulator is far simpler and less intense than the flight simulators. Nonetheless, what you tell a simulator is possible results in all it can do being within that realm of possibility. It can't think, it can't duplicate chance, it can't do "real world." It's a computer. God, humans and reality interact much differently
Last edited by a moderator:
