Later in the film, there was a shot of Carnegie Mellon's CHIMP robot considering a simulation of its future actions. In effect, it was predicting what it expected it would be able to do, and running through it, much like an athlete might visualize a race beforehand. It was a real-time rendered 3D animation that also served to give the researchers insight into how CHIMP was thinking about its next movements. (#)
talk-testing-distributed-systems-with-simulations
"Right now, you can almost measure the sophistication of an autonomy team—a drone team, a car team—by how seriously they take simulation," said Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz who led the firm's investment in the simulation company Improbable. "And Waymo is at the very top, the most sophisticated." (#)
We can improved our results with controlled randomness. We can simulate inputs to the system under test, using randomness to broaden our search of the state space. At the same time, we control the randomness to ensure our tests are repeatable and that we can verify when bugs are fixed. (#)
11:15 - for speed, using hexagonal architecture so you can plug in very fast simulators (#)
A simulator can artificially advance the clocks of a system to induce a leader election, while a "real" cluster has to wait real time to trigger certain logic. (#)