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One of my profs was fond of the saying "with enough money, anyone can design a bridge that will stand up. Only an engineer can design a bridge that will just stay up".

I think the same is true of simulation and modeling: it requires a domain expert to include the useful stuff in your model while skirting or abstracting away the extraneous bits.

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The second year civil engineers at my university had a project where they had to design a bridge that could support 2 people, but would break under the weight of 3, to teach that exact lesson.

People vary in weight by more than 50%. I don't see that the spec is possible.

Woosh..

That's the point!

The three people are known to you in advance (it’s your group). It was common to game this a little by saving the biggest person as the third one that had to break the bridge.

To quote Ulam

Knowing what is big and what is small is more important than being able to solve partial differential equations.

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