[Avaneya] Let's Go!

[Kip Warner]

Dear Patrons,

Avaneya[0] is more than a game; underlying it is a non-visual
simulation engine, Narayan. Narayan provides the foundation for
phenomena the artificial life in your thriving Martian metropolis will
experience. This design includes, but is not limited to, population
dynamics, inner city decay, gentrification, crime, pollution,
education, zoning, pedestrian and vehicle traffic flow, and many other
things. SimCity 2013's GlassBox[1] simulation engine was able to do
these things very well, but we are aiming to take things to the next
level. 

It was on this point that last year Narayan became of interest to the
National Research Council of Canada. It considered our project in a
highly competitive race for a much coveted Industrial Research
Assistance Program.[2] 

Narayan won. We received a substantial grant of $50,000 and the NRC's
blessings.

Since that time, and well before it, we undertook an enormous R&D
effort. In particular, on how to solve the problem of scalability to
allow enough interesting things to happen in your city simultaneously.
In a nutshell, it involves a synergy of different simulation paradigms
from systems dynamics and cellular automata taking advantage of GPUs,
DSPs, FPGAs, and any other hardware accelerators found in today's
commodity machinery in a unique way other than what they were
originally designed for. I will expand on this in future news.

Narayan aims to be a generalized high performance agent based social
simulation engine. The NRC is not interested in gaming, but when they
realized that Narayan may be usable in urban dynamics modelling for
real city planners they saw the enormous potential. Our research is now
moving from whiteboards and paper to code as you read this, but we need
your help.

Here is where we stand, and here is where we want to go: The simulation
engine is being implemented now. It is hands down the most thrilling
project I've ever worked on. It involves many disparate aspects of
computing science from graph and compiler theory to sparse matrices.
The money we've raised to date has been invaluable in augmenting the
technical library, acquiring better hardware, and most importantly
engineering time to make the end result of all this, a game, fun.

We can solve the scientific and engineering problems with the same kind
of magic we used to recover substantial portions of NASA's original
mission data of the first successful mission to the surface of
Mars.[3,4] What we need you for is your financial support to fuel the
development and completion of the simulation engine. After many
countless requests, we finally as of last night created a convenient
way to receive your support:

    https://www.patreon.com/avaneya

In addition to supporting Avaneya on Patreon, we sincerely need your
help getting the word out. Please share this project. Lets go to Mars.
Per ardua ad astra.

PS More major news to come next week.

[0] https://www.avaneya.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(2013_video_game)#Game_engine
[2] https://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/irap/about/mandate.html
[3] https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/software/#Viking
[4] 
https://www.straight.com/life/544186/geek-speak-kip-warner-project-lead-avaneya

Yours truly,

-- 
Kip Warner | Senior Software Engineer
OpenPGP signed/encrypted mail preferred
https://www.cartesiantheatre.com

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