Computer Help
The advent of low cost powerful computers has aided complex mathematical simulation of processes, and simulation software is often used by design engineers. Simulations can identify weaknesses in designs and allow engineers to choose better alternatives.
However, engineers still rely on heuristics, intuition, and experience when designing a process. Human creativity is an element in complex designs.
Read more about this topic: Process Design
Famous quotes containing the word computer:
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)