Last time, we saw how we can use computers to simulate other computers. This time, we'll see how we can use simulation for training. Here's the problem we're trying to solve: We're trying to teach people how to do something, and we're trying to give them enough practice doing it that they're really good at it, but the actual activity is too dangerous or too expensive, or infeasible in practice for them to actually do that particular activity a lot. Here are some examples; flying airplanes, doing space operations, doing medical procedures, driving or racing, or performing international relations. You should be able to see how each of those examples could be too dangerous, or too expensive, or infeasible to let people just do it a lot for practice to learn how to do it. This first image is of an F-16 flight simulator. So it's pretty expensive to fly F-16s around, and it's also fairly dangerous especially for beginners. So people learning to be pilots, not just of F-16, but any planes, require some training and practice that can be accomplished effectively in a simulator. You'd never want to climb into a plane that's piloted by somebody who's only ever flown a simulator, but they can be really useful for giving pilots a lot of practice. Space operations is another area in which, in fact, this is both expensive and infeasible to just send two people up into space to practice extra-vehicular activities as much as you need them to before they actually go and do it for real. That really doesn't even make sense. So we have things like this zero gravity or low gravity simulator so that astronauts can practice how that will work in space without actually sending them into space to try it out. We also have medical procedures, and this is from Mass General, the image that you're looking at here. You can see there are a number of people practicing a medical procedure that is in fact a mannequin. That's not a real person. Simulating driving and racing, if you watched the meet the instructor video and or read about my racing rig, you know that I have a rig that is intended to simulate as much as I can afford racing in video games. Of course, you can go further than what I have here. There are devices, the chair gets tilted around and so on, and so you experience the gravitational forces. You get to feel the Gs as you drive around because it's tilting you forward and so on. I have a budget that is less than tens of thousands of dollars. So I have this level of simulation, but the steering wheel on the upper left is in fact an appropriate size for a BMW. The base for that will provides reasonable realistic resistance as though I were actually driving. On the upper right, you can see that I have a hand brake and I have a shifter that is sequential or a gated shifter depending on how I went to drive around, and the bottom one is my bud kicker. So at least I can feel vibrations if I'm driving up over the curbs and so on. So this gives me some relatively realistic, not perfect, no simulation is perfect, but this gives me a more realistic experience in my driving games. I tend to drive simulation driving games rather than RKD-ish sorts of driving games. So this actually does give me an enjoyable and somewhat realistic experience. Now of course, the realism of the experience is also based on the game itself. Games that are designed to be simulations are more likely to be more realistic, because they're modeling lots of the details. Like the way tires reacts to wear and temperature and so on that other games don't. So they end up with a higher veracity as they do the simulation. To recap, in this lecture, we learned how we can use simulation in a variety of different training scenarios.