How about a perturb button so those special stable orbits can be nudged just enough to destabilize them.
Pause, choose a body, tweaks its mass, resume.
Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
61–70 of 119 posts
Re: Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
#62I spent a long time playing with the sim. Nice work. Most of the random data sets that I ran ended up with a two body system, where the third body was flung far into space never to return. However, some of these were misleading. I had one running for 15 minutes at 5x, and the third body did eventually return.
It might be fun to add some kind of visualization showing when a body has enough energy to potentially escape the system.
Agree. I was hoping perhaps it would "flash" or do something visually different to indicate "Bye bye!"
Re: Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
#63Re: Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
#64This is amazing! Nicely done! I did something similar, mostly 2D here: https://www.nhatcher.com/three-body-periodic/ (Mine is just unfinished)
what the heck? are those three orbits genuinely symmetrical in 2D or did I misinterpret
Re: Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
#65One thing I'd never really considered before is how frequently bodies get ejected at high speed from the simulation, especially as the number of initial bodies is increased. Suddenly made me realise that the "big bang" which previously seemed a bit of a random and magical theory (obvious question is why would the universe be expanding from a single point when gravity would be immense) now seems a lot more plausible w…
The universe isn't really expanding from a single point though, not in the sense that objects were flung away from that point into a vacuum like the objects in this simulation
Re: Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
#66How about a perturb button so those special stable orbits can be nudged just enough to destabilize them.
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Re: Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
#67One thing I'd never really considered before is how frequently bodies get ejected at high speed from the simulation, especially as the number of initial bodies is increased. Suddenly made me realise that the "big bang" which previously seemed a bit of a random and magical theory (obvious question is why would the universe be expanding from a single point when gravity would be immense) now seems a lot more plausible w…
I doubt that most (if not all) are physical. This happens since these are considered as point masses, which can not collide. Instead of a collision you get extremely high forces, which add another layer of unphysical results as the large numbers cause numerical problems.
Relating any of this to the big bang is not appropriate at all.
Re: Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
#68Is this with Gemini 3?
> Is this with Gemini 3? An LLM couldn't provide results for a sim like this, compared to a relatively simple numerical differential equation solver, which is how this sim works. Unless you're asking whether a sim like this could be vibe-coded, if so, the answer is yes, certainly, because the required code is relatively easy to create and test. Apart from a handful of specific solutions, there are no general closed-f…
Well I was wondering if it was vibe coded because Gemini 3 loves Three.js and that's a main selling point of the model.
Re: Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
#69Excellent work. Is this based on simple Newtonian gravity applied over a uniform time-step, or something more sophisticated?
What you describe is the Euler method, which is well known for being a comparatively bad choice in most situations. The ODE solver can be selected, the default is RK4, which is a Runge–Kutta method of 4th order, it computes the next time step by combining the values at 4 previous time steps.
Re: Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
#70No physics expert but isn't this unpredictable (based on what I saw in series) ? Amd this does seem predictable, I saw this for almost a minute
The math in the 3 body problem was made up.
Computing the trajectory of a 3 body problem is a comparatively simple task.
The two grains of truth are that the solutions for most starting conditions are not analytic, roughly meaning that they can not be expressed in terms of functions. The other being that the numerical solution to an ODE diverges exponentially.