Eternal Struggle

yurivish 623 points yoavg.github.io

https://github.com/yoavg/yoavg.github.io/tree/main/eternal

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francisduvivier

Some people here were asking for it so I quickly vibe forked a speed control slider for farming some karma here on Hacker News:

https://francisduvivier.github.io/eternal-struggle-with-spee...

Code: https://github.com/francisduvivier/eternal-struggle-with-spe...

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wvbdmp

Not to alarm anyone, but when I ran this, the black ball eventually joined the dark side and the whole thing ended up black. I’m sure this doesn’t mean anything for the greater universe.

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soneca

This happened to me in the original site. I think it happens when the white and black balls collide at the exact same spot of the border.

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francisduvivier

I think it's just a tunneling bug that happens when the point that make up the wall get messed up a enough. Almost never happens anymore in the v2^[1] that I added. This one also allows you to see these points.

[1] https://francisduvivier.github.io/eternal-struggle-with-spee...

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anthk

Declare it as a Quantum tunneling effect :p

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nialv7

black-white here doesn't mean bad-good. they just mean opposites, different aspects of things. I think wikipedia does a pretty good job explaining it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang

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kragen

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%99%B0#Traditional_Chinese (陰) lists the following definitions:

1. cloudy; overcast; gloomy

2. hidden; secret

3. negative [of electrical charge]

4. the Moon

5. shade; shadow

6. north of a mountain or south of a river

7. back side

8. of the nether world; of ghosts

9. (philosophy) "female" principle; yin in yin-yang

10. in intaglio

11. treacherous; deceitful; cheating

12. (dialectal) to deceive; to trick; to trap

13. (Chinese phonetics, of a syllable) open; not having a consonant coda

14. (Cantonese) bangs; fringe

15. genitalia (of humans)

16. a surname

The one (American) person I know who has 陰 as a surname reports that Chinese people are often shocked at her surname upon meeting her. I think it might be a bit like having the surname Death in English (https://www.ancestry.com/last-name-meaning/death?geo-lang=en...).

That is to say, black kind of does mean "bad" here, in the popular conception anyway. Taoism and Buddhism promote a worldview that sees birth and death, creation and destruction, as neither good nor bad, simply inseparable parts of a larger whole. But most everyday people try to avoid darkness, death, destruction, cloudiness, gloominess, shadows, ghosts, treachery, traps, and so on, most of the time. It's more that Taoism teaches that this attempt is foolish.

Not all the senses are unpopular; plenty of people like human genitalia, the Moon, and intaglio, and the shady side of a river can be nicer when it's hot out.

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temp0826

A little matter-antimatter asymmetry never hurt anyone

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Cthulhu_

Here we have it, an internet toy demonstrating how this asymmetry occurred. I expect physics papers soon.

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temp0826

Nobel prizes for everyone!

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camillomiller

Had the same experience and derived an absolutely unexpected bout of deep existential anxiety from it. Going to touch grass now.

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raspasov

The opposite can also happen (where the whole thing goes white).

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low_tech_punk

maxwell's demon peeking from the dark side

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bilbo-b-baggins

Metaphor for American politics.

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gedy

I am.. Tetsuo.

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d4rkn0d3z

Tunneling.

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rnotaro

This vibed coded implementation is buggy.

If you go to 64.00×, it can't slow back anymore.

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francisduvivier

Well that's fixed in the V2 with even more vibe coding:

https://francisduvivier.github.io/eternal-struggle-with-spee...

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patates

I think next level would be custom shapes, custom starting areas, more colors, ability to change physics (add gravity?), and user interacting (being able to help a fellow struggling entity -a ball in this case-, when it gets worse).

Someone put this into an AI super duper thinking max edition, sprinkle some MCP on top and see what happens lol

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nandomrumber

Rapidly converging on Conways Game of Life

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rottc0dd

Nice work.

Still buggy. If you increase the ball size and increase the speed, the whole thing goes black/white in 10 seconds.

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ks2048

Watching it at 100x is cool - you can just watch the border wiggle around (at this speed you may as well not even draw the balls).

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ks2048

Yes, going to 32x also won't let you back down to 1x. (16x and lower - yes).

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Hendrikto

vibe forked a speed control slider

Very on brand, it does not work correctly. I can turn the speed up but not back down again.

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francisduvivier

Yes true :D, I kind of just want to blame gpt-5 mini for it and that's one of the bad things about the bad coding, I immediately loose part of the sense of ownership and responsibility. I don't feel like I made it, I just managed it.

Now to be honest I saw this bug, but I decided to just release it anyways because I also already had the v2 in the works which incidentally already had this issue fixed.

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maxlin

Thanks :D I did really want to know what kind of shape it would tend towards over time.

Running 100x for some moments, the white part got pincer maneuvered by the black and I ended up with the whole circle becoming black. Don't know what to think of that lol

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brcmthrowaway

At fast speed I see a trail of the circles. What gives?

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patates

something about monitor refresh rate perhaps?

https://www.testufo.com

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pmontra

Of course we want to make a ball faster than the other one and let it win the struggle.

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rhubarbtree

Interesting data point on the vibe coding front, as this is very buggy. Doesn’t bode well for releasing an agent on a non-trivial problem!

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narrator

It looks like it converges to a normal distribution curve with white being the area under the curve.

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loandbehold

Why not other way around?

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kelnos

Feature request: show a "scoreboard", that is, with every collision, show the percent of the circle that's white, and percent that's black.

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MrJohz

The cool thing about this is that it's self-balancing - if either side gets larger than the other due to random chance, the ball in that side will have more space to bounce in, and therefore bounce less often, slowing its growth. Meanwhile, the ball in the smaller side will bounce more often in its smaller space, making up the ground.

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Animats

It's amazing how stable it is. It's been running in a background tab for a hour now, and it still has the yin/yang look.

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poopsmithe

Yeah, definitely run it in the foreground. Mine became completely black in about 3 hours.

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Animats

Me too. Does black always win? If so, why?

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Liron

I think the balls stop when the tab isn't focused

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dotancohen

That's in another two months.

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SonOfLilit

There are stableish equilibria that are not 50-50, e.g. one color having a donut around the other color that has a donut hole.

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aoeusnth1

That's not a stable equilibrium if the hits have a large enough effect with respect to the movement of the balls. The internal circle will create disturbances against both sides of the inner circle, but the outer ball will have to travel a longer distance to move from one side to the other to counter them.

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n2d4

Now the question remains, are there stableish equilibria that are 50/50? Splitting it into two half-circles sounds like an equilibrium at first glance, but I'm not convinced it is, as only a tiny bit of random luck seems to make it become a "horseshoe" pattern instead.

(That assumes that the simulation is randomized of course, which doesn't seem to be the case for the one in the link posted here.)

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istjohn

Yes, because it's not actually area that balances out but mean time between bounce against the black/white boundary.

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amelius

It seems there is a parallel with physics: two pressurized chambers with equal pressure and a membrane separating them. The odd thing here is that there is only one molecule in each of them.

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nandomrumber

All models are wrong…

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d4rkn0d3z

But some are useful.

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amelius

But you can say the same thing about a circle with a straight line as separator.

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jama211

I’m really keen to see what this looks like after significant time but I’m not going to leave it open on my phone for ages just to find out haha. Clever idea!

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personalcompute

Here is one sample taken after 5 minutes.

https://d6f9e5179057.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Screenshot%2...

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fxwin

https://i.imgur.com/cf1wOwL.png after a few minutes of running it at 240 frames per second :D

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jama211

Thank you, interesting!

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jama211

Thank you for this!

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navigate8310

I'm curious about using an S3 endpoint and that too in public. Aren't you worried if someone hammers your URL and drain credits?

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cmertayak

I desperately needed that :D

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xav_authentique

You can execute this in the devtools console:

data.whiteBall.v.x = 5; data.whiteBall.v.y = 5;

data.blackBall.v.y = 5; data.blackBall.v.x = 5;

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cdrini

Wow! Careful Icarus, going too fast makes it go kind of wild and started freezing the site :P

data.whiteBall.v.x = data.whiteBall.v.y = data.blackBall.v.y = data.blackBall.v.x = 10;

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obventio56

Also frameRate() with 120 or higher will make it go a bit faster. But it seems like there is a limit. I'm not familiar with p5.

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federico-peconi

so simple yet so deep!

anyone willing to provide a math-proof like argument on why the shape seem to stick to the YY curve indefinitely as the "eternal" name suggests?

Should it always be this way or is there at least one bad initial bouncing configuration for which chaos can take place and we loose the YY curve?

Does not seem that obvious to me.

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crazygringo

It doesn't. It quickly just becomes a random curve after a few minutes at normal speed if you leave it open.

For obvious reasons it tends to stay half white half black (if one half gets smaller its ball will bounce faster) but the shape and its orientation varies randomly.

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adtac

wow not even yin-yang can escape entropy or the heat death of the universe

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thejohnconway

People are responding to you saying that it doesn't retain the yin-yang shape, but I've been watching for a while on 64x speed, and the yin-yang shape is one it repeatedly returns to.

I'm not even a dimwitted individual with an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology, but I can see what's happening intuitively. When one of the balls makes an indent large enough, that indent focusses the bounce from the circular edge which reinforces the indent further. This leads to a semi-stable shape where one of the balls is bouncing around a horseshoe and the other in a tunnel. However, if one side of the horseshoe becomes pinched small enough that ball is less likely to enter, that side of get eliminated, and you have a yin-yang.

More simply, the round edge seems to encourage tunnelling, and any asymmetry in the tunnelling is yin-yang-ish.

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phreeza

Off the top of my head, there is no mechanism for tension, so it would basically approach a random curve with equal white and black areas over time, but in addition there is the point reassignment function which acts as a kind of low pass filter so you get something that looks like a sinusoid?

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stephenlf

I think it’s just random chance. I haven’t run any simulations or anything, but I suspect the YY curve is no more stable than any simple 50-50 split. I bet over large timespans the YY curve straightens out just from entropy.

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geor9e

It doesn't. Seems to be like a lava lamp until one ball breaks thru. See the other comment with the console command to edit the speed.

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Insanity

I guess it’s supposed to start on mouse move (based on skimming the source code).

On a phone it doesn’t seem to trigger unless I changed the background so I spent a minute just staring at the symbol without anything happening lol :D

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chunkles

If you tap on the ying-yang it starts.

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bqmjjx0kac

Hmm, not on iOS Safari.

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Insanity

Yup that’s the browser I am using as well.

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throwaway314155

change the background

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Insanity

Yup.. read my original comment :)

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MarcelOlsz

Cool now I'm not going to get anything done. Thanks OP. PLEASE add a speed control so I can speed it up to it's logical conclusion and move on with my day.

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riku_iki

you can keep tab open and check in few weeks.

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cmertayak

Please let us know what happens.

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riku_iki

Its interesting that my is converging into straight line dividing circle half/half, unlike other examples in the comments.

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romaaeterna

An edge point's probability of being hit should be proportional to the length of every path leading to that edge point. An area closer to many short black paths and many long white paths will show black expansion (and vice-versa). So I suspect that any variation of the central line from a straight bisection of the circle should get hammered out over time.

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fxwin

you can run frameRate(x) in your browser's console to speed it up a bit - might be limited by your monitor's refresh rate though

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alwa

I too am impatient to learn the logical conclusion of “eternal struggle.”

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MarcelOlsz

It can't be that eternal.

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teamworketernal

I was cheering on the black circle's tunneling project when they both got caught in a rapid-fire spiral and the black one glitched through to the other side.

https://imgur.com/a/dhCSNmi

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panarchy

I think it misinterpreted what kind of tunneling you were cheering on.

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cocoto

Had the exact same bug! Not so rare I think.

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camtarn

Hah! I was wondering if that was possible.

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volemo

The darkness has come upon the world!

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alyxya

I watched it for an hour, and at some point the black ball crossed the boundary onto the black side, so eventually the whole circle became black.

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drob518

It went to the dark side.

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SarahC_

The coming of Satan is foretold!

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mikedelfino

Shouldn't each circle be pulling in its own color instead of pushing the other one out? Right now it looks like they're expanding the opposing color, when you'd think they'd be rooting for themselves.

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throwaway314155

The most self evident piece of work/art I have ever seen and yet there's so many comments explaining why it works and how it's interesting...

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ycombinete

To me it's working backwards though. i.e. the black ball is creating more whitespace and visa versa. It's not immediately evident to me why that would be the case.

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axblount

Does some interesting things if you up the ball speed to 20. The boundary breaks down.

  data.blackBall.v = data.whiteBall.v = createVector(0, 20);

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cocoto

Mine broke even without speeding up things, the black ball is now working together with the white ball.

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waltbosz

I want to see a real world version that uses one of those magnetic sand sculpture tables. https://sisyphus-industries.com/

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4ndr3vv

It'd be interesting to see how the visuals change when you're viewing the path, rather than a filled area.

Not seen one of these tables with two balls in... You'd probably need quite a lot of height to offset the linear sliders so didn't collide with each other.

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amelius

What would a 3d version of this look like?

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lgas

More spherical.

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Lerc

I made a game on this principle many years ago. Two players with turn left,turn right, thrust and fire. You can only exist in your own space, shooting at the walls dug holes of your colour.

You had a bunch of critters scattered around the map trying to get home and you had to make paths for them while stopping your opponent from getting their critters home.

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darkstarsys

Cool! It would benefit from better physics though, maybe supersampling the position in time especially when moving fast. Each ball can't push to its edge fully, for instance.

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swayvil

It's cool.

It would be better if there was only 1 kind of edge instead of 2.

I refer to the broken edge and the circle edge.

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lacoolj

Raava and Vaatu made into a game of dual-solitary pong

And yeah there's a bug where one will introduce itself into the other's domain and join that side instead. Very life-like :)

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makepanic

You can press P to toggle the edge point visibility.

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swayvil

How on phone?

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hlava

Are there any initial conditions that converge to a line?

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dvh

I see that you haven't seen alphaPhoenix' video about reverse game of life. I highly recommend it.

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ticklyjunk

nice. tell me that was dreamed and vibe coded over a cup of coffee and I will believe you

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SkipperCat

An excellent piece of artwork! Really captures the meaning of Yin Yang, at least to me.

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PlunderBunny

Sometimes I see the 'border' move slightly where a ball hasn't hit it. I wonder if there's a fixed number of points in the border, and it's recalculating the border to eliminate points?

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mensetmanusman

What happens at the limit of infinity!

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blue_light_man

You are already at limit of infinity.

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hcaugifyd6sco

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kingforaday

You can press 'p' to show the points on the curves.

  function keyPressed() {
    if (key === 'p') SHOW_POINTS = !SHOW_POINTS;
  }

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joshdavham

Is there any interesting mathematics associated with this system?

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hk__2

Source code: https://github.com/yoavg/yoavg.github.io/tree/main/eternal

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dang

We'll put that link in the top text as well. Thanks!

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smusamashah

Something similar was shared before, but it wasn't this shape, just plain old rectangle style.

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otherayden

To speed it up, run

['whiteBall', 'blackBall'].forEach(color => { data[color].v.x *= 5; data[color].v.y *= 5 });

In dev console :)

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jomarry

I cant perfectly cause i dont know how to control. . I dont have any loptop for use to creat it. I use my phone

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cluckindan

Now that we have the simulation, what is the closed form solution?

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dmos62

I'd phrase it "eternal adventure".

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clocker

reminded me of this one that ends at some point

https://ask5.github.io/gold-wars/

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trilogic

Simply amazing.

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barbazoo

I laughed really hard at this :)

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joebig

Similar to Pong wars: https://pong-wars.koenvangilst.nl/

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sabellito

Got a horseshoe shape running at 50x for 60 seconds:

https://imgur.com/a/b6b2IDx

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andoando

Same, if one of them punches through in one place, that hole shapes the angle of the bounces and reinforces itself and the other side fills in around the hole.

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keepamovin

That is so cool! That is art in motion and a philosophical statement. Well done, man! That is beautiful and brilliant.

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panarchy

$10 on black

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AlexCoventry

Manicheanimation