Why should I simulate the real world?
This is the root of a tree of questions aimed at programmers and non-technical readers wanting to learn the fundamentals of simulation technology and how it can be useful to the world.
So, why simulate real-world systems at all?
The answer in short: simulations can help us discover better actions to take in our decision-making and interrogate the reasoning behind a decision in ways other predictive AI approaches cannot match.
To understand this answer properly, we can build up our understanding in layers.
State partitions and timesteps give us a way to describe how a system evolves in time; these are the fundamental building blocks.
Probabilistic thinking gives us a way to reason about its possible trajectories without enumerating them.
Objectives and learning algorithms give us a way to fit parameters to data.