“…One long standing approach to this problem (which has met with varying degrees of success) has been to introduce a Hamiltonian semi-discretization of the PDE using, for example, spectral methods or finite differencing and then applying a symplectic scheme to integrate the semi-discrete system in time; see e.g. [4,10,12,14,16,23]. The resulting numerical schemes preserve the symplectic structure of the semi-discretization but as the level of discretization is refined or the dimension of the system is increased, the advantage obtained using the symplectic integrator can occur only on a long enough timescale (see the numerical experiments in Section 5.1).…”