AS COMPUTERS become bigger and faster they are able to tackle ever-more realistic problems. However, is it possible to discover new physics with computers? While this question is open to debate, it certainly seems as if computer simulations have helped theorists to find analytic solutions to problems that had previously resisted human brain power alone. A recent example is the exact solution of a one-dimensional particle coagulation model by Bernard Derrida, Vincent Hakim and Vincent Pasquier of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and the Service de Physique Theorique in Saclay (Phys. Rev. Lett. 1995 75 751). The effect studied by Derrida and co-workers had been discovered in computer simulations of that workhorse of statistical physics, the Ising model.
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