10. Recent Developments
A. Baumgärtner, Daphnee Levesque, Claudio Rebbi, Yoshito Saito · 1987
Although only le ss t han t hree yea rs have elaps ed s in ce then, the field of com put er s imulation has expanded so enormousl y that a complete account of all the re cent work would require a whole boo k, rat her than an addi t i onal chapte r . Thus we shall present a very condensed guide t o the litera t ure only, empha sizing s ome high lights, as well as recent general t rends in the commu nity of workers applying Mo nte Carlo (M C) methods, but cannot go into the details of the phys i cs whi ch is bei ng studied . One re ason for thi s growth of the fie ld i s t hat the usefu lness of M C s im ulations has now been real ized more widely t han a coupl e of years ago: in f act, MC s i mul ati ons bel ong to th e main tas ks of supercom puters whi ch are becoming i ncr eas ingly available for sc ienti f ic re sear ch . In additi on, special purpose compute rs have been dedicated specifi cally to the M C simulati on of var ious models in s t atis ti cal mechani cs , and some of them have yi el ded very usefu l results . Some of these recent trends and developments have been briefly r evi ewed by one of the aut hors of th is upd ate in a chapt er i n the compani on volume [10 .1] but clea rly t his i s a sub ject i n f lux. The out line of this new chapter now more or l ess fol l ows t he plan of the book, each section corresponds t o one of the f irst nine chapt ers of t hi s bO OK.