[michelpp]

Real buildings must take into account material costs, weight bearing, soil conditions, thermal cycling through various paths, and human and seismic induced dynamic loads. The larger the buildings get, the exponentially more compute is needed to solve these problems.

“Anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”

[choonway]

You can still design 99% of the bridges in existence today with commercially available software and hardware from 10 years ago.

Why do you want to make a bridge that barely stands?

Instead you want your engineer to:

1. build it cheaply and quickly,

2. maintenance is cheap and non disruptive.

3. probability of unplanned failure is small, eg once in 100,000 years