Due to the the recent terrible bridge collapse Stephan Wolfram thought about possible ways to find new bridge designs. The way he suggests is to utilize the power of computers and start a kind of “brute-force design”. The idea is to use simple programs to generate vast numbers of possible bridge designs—say, different possible layouts of struts—and then run a simulation on each one to see how well it performs. (Popular Science Blog)
Credit: Wolfram Research
Depending on the performance of the used algorithms this could be a very promising way to find new constructions but at least it’s another interesting method to stimulate our out-of-the-box thinking.
