When the thermal imaging discussion came up (this time) I finally
realized there are at least two philosophies at work here.
One group wants to image thermals so they can fly their planes better.
Another group flys their planes to get an image of the thermal worked
out.
As usual, I fall into the crack. I am just really really curious to see
what a thermal looks like and see how it behaves in different circumstances.
To that end, I would be glad to revive (as a venture off-line from RCSE)
a discussion among interested parties in designing and writing a program to
simulate thermal activity via cellular automaton. Some of you may remember
Compton's game called "Life" from your early days of fiddling with
computers. A field is cut up onto grids, and each cell is either 'dead' or
'alive' based on a few simple rules. To the surprise of Compton and
everyone else,the simple minded "game" exhibits very lifelike behavior.
A couple of years ago I suggested a cellular automaton to simulate
atmospheric thermals, and got a couple of guys interested in writing
programs. The effort petered out, but showed some promise. We had one
little DOS program that sort of bubbled and burped but never developed big
thermal plumes. I think I gave the writer the wrong set of rules.
If any of you are interested, here's what we need:
a programmer for Windows or DOS
some folks with meteorological experience to describe the real world
some folks to take a look at the Life game, and then suggest "rules" for
the cellular automaton
some folks to play with the program and see how it compares to our
experience as flyers.
Tom Nagel
Columbus, Ohio
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