> The best way to get a fast intuition for why the simulation is superior is to take an entry-level CAD course with a focus on material design.
I'm sorry but you're completely missing the point of my question. The question was not "what can simulations do that experiments can't". My background in simulation is not zero, and I've never had that question. The question as something else entirely.
> You can’t measure a number of internal stress-strain conditions during the moment of failure
But what if that's not what I'm interested in simulating or measuring? What if all I care about is something easily measurable, like the length of each remaining piece? Isn't that precisely my point here? There are so many things quantum computers can't compute either - yet we seem to be judging them by what they're really good at. Just like with the wooden stick. So how do I tell if they're the same sort of scenario or not? What's the distinguishing criterion?
> What if all I care about is something easily measurable, like the length of each remaining piece?
If you're not just talking about the two large pieces, but also the lengths of the small splintered pieces, I suspect the computer is going to be a lot faster at figuring that out than you will be manually measuring them.
Your responses in this thread seem to be a bit disingenuous: first you ask why a computer simulation could be better than doing it manually, but then when people tell you the things the computer can do faster/better than you, you say "but what if I don't care about that?" Well, duh, if you don't care about anything but the most trivial things, the computer probably isn't going to be of any benefit to you.
> first you ask why a computer simulation could be better than doing it manually
No, I never asked this at all. Some people changed the question to this for reasons I still don't understand. The actual question I asked was: "what are the criteria for distinguishing those scenarios from the interesting cases? And how do we know which case this one is like?"
The whole point here is to figure out if the problems they're declaring computational superiority on are analogous to the wooden stick problem here. Not to ask "when are simulations better than doing it manually".
"Unrealistic" or "contrived" don't really get to the heart of the matter, at least not as I understand them. The stick example can be extremely useful and realistic - it doesn't really make any difference to the question.
Perhaps another way to phrase it (though I'm not 100% sure this is equivalent) is: how do they know whether whatever they're accomplishing is quantum computation, as opposed to something else (like analog computation) that happens to be concerned with quantum physics.
I'm sorry but you're completely missing the point of my question. The question was not "what can simulations do that experiments can't". My background in simulation is not zero, and I've never had that question. The question as something else entirely.
> You can’t measure a number of internal stress-strain conditions during the moment of failure
But what if that's not what I'm interested in simulating or measuring? What if all I care about is something easily measurable, like the length of each remaining piece? Isn't that precisely my point here? There are so many things quantum computers can't compute either - yet we seem to be judging them by what they're really good at. Just like with the wooden stick. So how do I tell if they're the same sort of scenario or not? What's the distinguishing criterion?