On Time Structure in (Monte Carlo) Simulations

Abstract

There has recently proliferated a spate of Simulation Programming systems. They agree in asserting that the simulation advances in a two-phase manner, and on precious little else. Since each programming system, once adopted, imposes a particular attitude to the way the world works, it seems desirable to the writer to attempt to clarify the notions involved and comment on the advantages and disadvantages of the various viewpoints that may be adopted. He also proposes a conceptually original viewpoint, which in his view subsumes the advantages of previously proposed attitudes and has only the disadvantage of requiring a very heavy burden of analysis to set up the flow of the programme, a job that can safely be left to the programming system. He suggests that no object system requires for its structuring all its complexity but subsets are easily implementable ad hoc to give efficient experiments on computing facilities.