Mythical mirrors

My post about Twins, digital and mythological got me thinking about magical mirrors.

Twins, digital and mythological

A comment piece in Nature this week talks about mirror worlds (cf. RF mirror worlds), though the authors use the currently-fashionable term “digital twins” rather than Gelernter’s “mirror worlds.” While there's more to be said about the substance of the piece (it's a very technocratic and manufacturing-oriented perspective), I'm going to focus on the cultural underpinnings.

RF Mirror Worlds: Supercomputing meets propagation models, 3D terrain data and ubiquitous sensors

Petri Mähönen has observed that wireless researchers haven’t exploited supercomputing as much as one might expect, especially in comparison with other scientific disciplines such as aerospace, meteorology, oceanography, biology, sociology... If they had, we could be exploring thousands or millions of “Test Cities” rather than just the one contemplated in the PCAST Report (pdf, Chapter 6 and Appendix G). The PCAST budget for the first three years of a Test City (Table G.1) runs to $21 million in operating expenses and $15 million in capital expenses – that would buy a lot of computation!

I suspect (hope!) we’re on the verge of a step change in using software simulation, aka “mirror worlds”, to understand and manage radio systems. The underlying technology has been on the exponential growth curve we’ve all heard about, but hasn’t broken through to high profile visibility. It may soon.