[HN Gopher] Open source software for modeling soft materials
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Open source software for modeling soft materials
Author : nill0
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-03-09 17:03 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (now.tufts.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (now.tufts.edu)
| AlbertoGP wrote:
| > _The Morpho language. Morpho is a programmable environment for
| shape optimization and scientific computing tasks more generally.
| Morpho aims to be:_
|
| > _- Familiar. Morpho uses syntax similar to other C-family
| languages. The syntax fits on a postcard, so it 's easy to
| learn._
|
| > _- Fast. Morpho programs run as efficiently as other well-
| implemented dynamic languages like wren or lua (Morpho is often
| significantly faster than Python, for example). Morpho leverages
| numerical libraries like BLAS, LAPACK and SUITESPARSE to provide
| high performance._
|
| > _- Class-based. Morpho is highly object-oriented, which
| simplifies coding and enables reusability._
|
| > _- Extendable. Functionality is easy to add via packages, both
| in Morpho and in C or other compiled languages. Packages can be
| downloaded, installed and distributed via the morphopm package
| manager._
|
| > _MIT License_
|
| > _Languages: C 98.8% Python 0.7% CMake 0.5% Batchfile 0.0%
| Makefile 0.0% Objective-C 0.0%_
|
| https://github.com/Morpho-lang/morpho
|
| That builds libmorpho.so, the CLI is at:
|
| https://github.com/Morpho-lang/morpho-cli
|
| I'm not involved in this project in any way, just trying it out
| because it sounds interesting.
| theknarf wrote:
| This youtube video (that was linked in their readme, seems to
| go into more details:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odCkR0PDKa0
| twnettytwo wrote:
| This is likely just Journalism, but the title (that of the
| original article) is slightly misleading. This appears to be a
| programming language for modelling soft materials... although I
| am not sure (having looked only at the Github repo and RTD) I
| understand what kind of research this targets... the roadmap and
| API makes it seem fairly general purpose - IMO it would be nice
| to see some (atleast potential) usecases directly in the
| repository.
| megaloblasto wrote:
| Does anyone who wasnt involved in creating these large open
| source math libraries have good success in using them? During my
| phd I tinkered with so many different PDE solvers, FEM packages
| and the like, and I ended up just coding everything from scratch
| for my specific problem. I don't know about Morpho specifically,
| but I often found it so difficult to understand how the authors
| were thinking about the problem that it wasn't worth the time to
| learn the ins and out of the software.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I tried one. As I recall, the examples were gigantic, they
| expected scenes to be described in XML, and it took an hour to
| compile.
|
| It looked cool in demos, but there was no way to get a foothold
| on it as a library. I never got it to do anything useful. I
| only made modest progress by implementing a custom XML tag that
| let me get my data into one of their huge example programs.
|
| I'm a better programmer now than I was then, but I still kinda
| think that software sucked.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Why's this a programming language rather than a library?
| xyzal wrote:
| Beautiful project! I've been obsessed with modeling soft
| materials since playing Dead or Alive in the 90s.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| I don't know about this project specifically, but this kind of
| work is soon going to be tremendously valuable because of AI.
| Instead of engineers designing products directly, they will build
| a simulator, write an objective function, and submit this data to
| a general purpose ML/RL API hosted by one of the big labs. The AI
| will run a billion simulations and use RL to create a design that
| optimizes the objective function.
|
| Simulate Literally Everything!
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'm not so sure about this. We are not even the point where
| auto placement and routing for PCB is there. And the reason is
| simple, the amount of constraints required is just too much
| work to put in for a person. They may as well do it themselves
| at that point.
|
| I would expect most design is like this. There are thousands of
| constraints a designer has in the back of their head, most they
| are not even consciously aware of. The optimization of the
| objective is the trivial part. Defining the proper objective
| function will be very hard.
| whatshisface wrote:
| This is actually one of the scenarios where AI (I just mean
| machine learning) would have a real value proposition,
| because of the need to infer the implicit constraints from
| many example circuits. Figuring out all the things that
| people think are obvious, but that take too long to input, is
| kind of the thing AI is useful for.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's been tried. PCB design is a huge industry. And it has
| just not worked. I was of the same opinion you have but
| it's not like there has not been millions and millions
| invested into this without real impact. Every year there is
| a new sway of companies that tries. Perhaps AI is now good
| enough, I'm not holding my breath.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| It's also been tried in the mechanical world ("Generative
| Design" in Autodesk's language) and it's still mostly in
| the "cool demo, bro" phase. The parts end up being
| expensive and difficult to manufacture due to the unusual
| geometry. You're penalized for exploring the design space
| because it runs on cloud credits (more exploration ==
| more cost). Just not very compelling yet.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| You could argue that millions and millions isnt enough,
| but leveraging the billions spent on AI might change
| things.
|
| I'm not holding my breath either though.
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