>>13154866I'm a mechanical engineering person, not a computer science person so don't think too heavily of my explanation.
All programming involves some kind of algorithm, and obviously making a simulation involves programming. An algorithm is a simple list of instructions that a computer can follow. They can be very efficient (use relatively few steps to do something complicated) or inefficient (the opposite). They can be structured linearly in a list, like I said, or in loops (for loops, if loops, and so on). In the context of simulations, yes, you will have some subroutine in the program that computes quantities over chunks of time and space.
Simulations are usually based on the same physical (or biological or chemical or economic) models you find in textbooks, and then adapted to work better with the discrete nature of computing with finite element, or finite difference, or finite volume, etc methods. These methods, in basic terms, break down the natural, continuous laws of your simulation into discrete chunks that the computer can then handle. This is like an algorithm.
