Date: 2016-11-05 09:51 From: Mike Speciner <ms@alum.mit.edu>
This is a great toy! I delete everything except six identical balls (and maybe one wall), set one ball to bounce around for a while before disrupting the others, run it half a minute into the disruption, save it out, and show it time-reversed to some unsuspecting person. Or if I'm afraid they'll notice the negative time passage, I manually negate all the velocities before saving. (Is there a way to load one of those text files?) Unfortunately, neither of these reversal stunts is perfect, due to accumulated numerical errors, which I assume you've worked hard to minimize. So let's get particularly math-y and ask: Given rational positions and velocities, can we simulate one of these six-ball scenarios exactly and indefinitely, without runaway denominator buildup, nor irrational collision results? --rwg