You could probably look at protein folding libraries like pymol. Although not exactly the same, it’s generally close enough to ropes and it has enough knobs where you should be able to run the simulations you want

Hmmm. PyMol is molecular viewer, which has a python scripting interface to various libraries ... but is not a folding library I would say.

There is some research into the topology of DNA (especially circular DNA, like plasmids which is a knot) that considers things like writhe and twist. Not sure it would adapt too well to macroscopic systems though.

There is also the excellent KnotPlot for actually drawing the knots. I bought a licence once on a whim, but rarely use it :)

Wouldn't really be helpful- first, pymol is a visualizer, not a folder. Also, proteins have properties very, very different from typical knots.

That does raise an interesting question- can proteins spontaneously fold into knots? The answer is yes although I was discouraged when I originally asked this question in grad school.

Maybe you can look into (extended) position based dynamics https://positionbaseddynamics.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about... for ropes.

If knots are what's interest you more, then maybe you can have a look at the self-collision avoidance of "Repulsive Curves" http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/RepulsiveCurves/

In general, the interesting properties of real ropes are not well-modeled by simulation. Dirt, abrasion, water, stress concentrations, and other real factors will dramatically impact the results you get out in the real world. That's why these things are experimentally verified and ropes used in safety-critical applications (are supposed to) have huge safety margins, regular monitoring, and ideally regular replacement. Use the manufacturer numbers for real ropes.

But if you just want to simulate ropes, there's a few models out there from academics going "let's try and model this difficult system more accurately". Take a look at stuff like imc-der [0] and ridgerunner [1].

[0] https://github.com/QuantuMope/imc-der

[1] https://jasoncantarella.com/wordpress/software/ridgerunner/

I've been curious about this too- there seems to be an underexplored area of physics around designing new knots with useful properties ("easy to untie under load") and it's not addressed by knot theory at al.