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Learn GeoscienceThe powerful engine behind all Leapfrog modelling products is made up in part by implicit modelling algorithms

What is Implicit Modelling?

Implicit modelling is the fast and automated formation of surfaces such as grade, faults and alteration directly from geological data. Explicit modelling is what is considered the ‘traditional’ manual method of wire framing and digitising.

Leapfrog pioneered the implicit modelling method of geological modelling, which has been rapidly adopted around the world as it significantly speeds up the modelling process, and allows models to be automatically updated as data is adjusted. The Leapfrog engine takes care of the labour intensive and repetitive work, to give you more time for interpretation and the consideration of multiple hypotheses.

Are all implicit modelling engines created equal?

The quality of an implicit modelling engine lies in the algorithms that determines how known data points are used to imply (or estimate) unknown data points to create surfaces. Radial Basis Functions (RBF’s) are the basic method to do this, however they have their limitations.

Many years of research by leading mathematicians culminated in the creation of FastRBF™, the industry revolutionising algorithm that powers Leapfrog.

The main difference between traditional RBF’s and FastRBF™ is its ability to deal with very large datasets of well over 1,000,000 points incredibly quickly, and on ordinary computing hardware. FastRBF™ also has extraordinary extrapolation capabilities, even when large gaps occur in a data set.

FastRBF™ and the algorithms behind it have been continually improved to specialise in modelling geology since Leapfrog was launched in 2004. It is widely regarded as the most superior implicit modelling engine on the market.

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