At 12:57 PM 9/29/2003, John Conway wrote:
There doesn't seem to be any difference to me. Think of them as unit vectors, whose inner products may not exceed such-&-such.
I'm very rusty on that, having not used it in about 25 years. That's the kind of thing for which I might need help. At first I was thinking of using Cartesian coordinates on the spheres then I thought that using spherical coordinates on the caps would probably be better, but I haven't worked out any details. Most of the time used by the program will be in calculating the coordinates of a sphere/cap that touches the required number of others. This is where the method used will matter. It doesn't have to be optimal (as far as calculation speed) but it does need to be good.