Physicists Discover a Whopping 13 New Solutions to Three-Body Problem

Re:Physicists Discover a Whopping 13 New Solutions to Three-... by gngeal on Saturday March 09, 2013 @08:33AM (#5348342)

Hah, my high school memories - a graphical gravity simulator project for my CS class, leaking energy due to the use of a very naive integrator (the Euler method for ODEs).

You might want to try Stormer-Cowell, it's sort of a gold standard in orbit simulation.

UPDATED: Hmm, now that I think of it, this would probably profit more from a variable step method. Some of the close approaches seem to be really close for a fixed-step integrator.

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Re:Physicists Discover a Whopping 13 New Solutions to Three-... by jbochi on Saturday March 09, 2013 @08:52AM (#5348373)

Thanks! I did not know Stormer-Cowell, but googling it, I've found a comparision to DROMO, suggesting that it's even more stable: http://www.congrex.nl/11c01proceedings/Papers/2225317%20Pela...

I'll try both if I find the time :)

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Re:Physicists Discover a Whopping 13 New Solutions to Three-... by tikhonj on Saturday March 09, 2013 @07:19PM (#5350115)

Heh, that's exactly what I made with a friend for a physics project in high school. We didn't even consider different methods--we used the Euler method because it's the most intuitive. I didn't even know it had a name!

Good times.

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