Photos The Model
"Some forms are easier to get than others," Gravner told Discovery News. In this way the model seems to reflect the predominant crystals seen in nature, he said. "I think it's a real big advance since nobody was able to do it before," said Libbrecth. "People have tried to get realistic snowflakes and it just didn't work." Those previous attempts tended to succeed up to a certain point, after which the virtual crystals would go nuts, probably because of errors that built up in the computations and overpowered the simulation, Libbrecht told Discovery News. "These guys were able to generate some structures that were very well-behaved," said Libbrecht. Their success is all the more interesting, said Libbrecht, because the details of the physics Gravner and Griffeath programmed into their model are not quite in line with what he and some other physicists think are going on in snow crystal formation. So either the physicists have been wrong, Libbrecht said, or there's something about the modeling approach that allows it to work despite the physics. Either way, it's a bit of a mystery.
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