Gravity Simulator • Hacker News Board

Re: Gravity Simulator

#31

Post by soci » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 8:58 AM UTC

A friend of mine made something similar to this for iOS a while ago: http://gravityapp.info

His app is being used in schools.

Re: Gravity Simulator

#32

Post by dharma1 » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:24 AM UTC

this is awesome. had a look into doing this on the GPU a while ago, barnes-hut was the best speedup I could find

There has to be a game in this somewhere...

Re: Gravity Simulator

#33

Post by bdaver » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:29 AM UTC

I've made touch interactive installation at 2008 with similar physics simulation http://vimeo.com/19361057

Re: Gravity Simulator

#34

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:32 AM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #24

andreif wrote: post #20

Next step: add dark matter

My simulator models dark energy (dark matter might be very difficult to model, since we don't understand it): http://arachnoid.com/orbital_dynamics/

[deleted]

Re: Gravity Simulator

#35

Post by jgraham » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:37 AM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #6

It doesn't work with Mozilla Shumway.

Can you file a (shumway) bug? [1]

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...

Re: Gravity Simulator

#36

Post by dudeson » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:41 AM UTC

Sun is the god.. (jk)

http://s29.postimg.org/yb6ly7ybp/111.png

Re: Gravity Simulator

#37

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:43 AM UTC

alandarev wrote: post #29

Such an amazing simulator to play with. I can only imagine how breath-taking this can be for kids to play around, plus it teaches physics!

Think about how breath-taking and educating must it be for a kid to write such a thing.

As a person who actually learned basic mechanics by writing video games I do believe that "you ain't understood nothing until you know how to teach it to a computer". Trying to express knowledge in (working) code is a great exercise that mercilessly catches even tiny holes in one's understanding.

Re: Gravity Simulator

#38

Post by spain » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:48 AM UTC

Very fascinating! It reminds me of Conway's Game of Life, looking for different kinds of patterns that will make a stable construct and do something interesting.

Re: Gravity Simulator

#39

Post by Zardoz84 » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:48 AM UTC

dharma1 wrote: post #32

this is awesome. had a look into doing this on the GPU a while ago, barnes-hut was the best speedup I could find There has to be a game in this somewhere...

Check NVIDIA papers of doing "n bodies problem" on CUDA. They got awesome results.

Re: Gravity Simulator

#40

Post by zamalek » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 10:11 AM UTC

carlob wrote: post #16

Why Euler? Isn't that terribly unstable?

Only in low FPS scenarios (it becomes even worse if the FPS is low AND wildly varies). For a toy like this there is nothing wrong with using Euler.