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March 10, 2004
Living in the future
Living in the future is so much fun.
I remember taking a class in Astronomy in college (back in the late 80s) and talking to the professor about the Sci-Fi game Traveller. How much trouble would it be, I asked him, to mock up a solar system? I wanted to get the orbits right so you could determine travel times between planets properly.
The professor sighed and started talking about the N-Body Problem, and how horribly difficult the math was -- to the point that it would be senseless to do it for a game.
That was then...
Today I have a screen saver called Cavendish, that does 3D, real-time gravitation simulations with lots of bodies (I've set it up to 200 and it hasn't complained). The full version of the program is $14.
You might not like progress, but you have to admit we have had a bunch of it.