Digital Twin

A bespoke, dynamically evolving system of three parts: a physical object or system, a computational model of it, and — "equally important" — a communication channel connecting them, so that the pair is recursive (input to one alters the other). The twin may capture an existing system's physics, stand in for a prototype, or itself be the prototype before anything is built. NASA coined the term in 2010 and retrofitted an origin in Apollo-era capsule replicas (Apollo 13's fifteen simulators). Maughan's interest is the scale-up — engines, assembly lines, Synth 3D's 1.5 billion buildings, a "digital twin for Germany," Earth-2 and Destination Earth — where twins promise "an unbreakable causal connection between simulator and simulated": foresee disturbances and automate the response. That promise is the sim-to-real gap's mirror image (the Walmart drone and the dog).