2) Modelling Techniques
TOPIC OF THE CLASS:
Abstraction
Model
… Sep 2024
Models and Reality
Abstraction and Human Mind
Those are simplification of reality because our mind continuously re-works reality by applying cognitive processes.
Abstraction: capability of finding the commonality in many different observations:
generalization: generalize specific features of real objects
classification: classify the objects into coherent clusters
aggregation: aggregate objects into more complex ones
Models - Introduction
Model: a simplified or partial representation of reality, defined in order to accomplish a task or to reach an agreement.
It is wrong by definition because we do not include all informations.
Apply them only after checking the underlying simplifications and evaluated its practicability.
Purposes:
descriptive purposes: a description
prescriptive purposes: building a model for something that does not exist yet - the recipe on how to build it
In-Class Exercise -
2 Modelling Techniques
1
We aim for abstraction and simplification, removing all the useless details.
Our mind daily abstracts reality, at the engineering level we use models.
