Our real world is infinitely complex, and one of the key ways in which we know things is by dilligently observing it. This is the world of data. Unfortunately, for many of life’s fun questions, this data is inaccessible, hidden behind microscopic random perturbations that we struggle to make sense of.
In the absence of observation we can turn to another tool humans use to learn about the world: reasoning. This is the world of simulation. Simulation takes the strands of data we do have and weaves them together into a model. We can then use this model to answer questions we previously couldn’t via observation.