Is "Equation-free modeling" as much fun as it sounds?

Abstract:

The speaker is a fan of SIAM's Snowbird meeting, which happens every two years and is devoted to the applications of Dynamical Systems. The two most recent meetings (2003 & 2005) have included many intriguing talks about "Equation-free modeling", a topic that, according to one's prejudices, sounds like either "pain-free gain" or "alcohol-free beer". In the event it proves to be neither of these things, but rather a circle of interesting simulation techniques that combine microscopic simulation with macroscopic averaging. The talk will include a journal-club style discussion of a recent, very clear, paper by Carlo Laing (see http://tinyurl.com/ddjnf ) as well as an application to a problem in the statistical mechanics of one-dimensional hard sphere gasses originally described by Lu, Yi and Kadanoff (see http://tinyurl.com/9myh2 ).