I'm in complete agreement with the idea that people should express themselves in their own words. But this collides with certain facts about U.S. adults (and students). This summary (https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...) reveals that:
* 28% of U.S. adults are at or below "level 1" literacy, essentially meaning people unable to function in an environment that requires written language skills.
* 54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.
These statistics refer to an inability to interpret written material, much less create it. As to the latter, a much smaller percentage of U.S. adults can compose a coherent sentence.
We're moving toward a world where people will default to reliance on LLMs to generate coherent writing, including college students, who according to recent reports are sometimes encouraged to rely on LLMs to complete their assignments.
If we care to, we can distinguish LLM output from that of a typical student: An LLM won't make the embarrassing grammatical and spelling errors that pepper modern students' prose.
Yesterday I saw this headline in a major online media outlet: "LLMs now exceed the intelect [sic] of the average human." You don't say.
I'm in Canada and the landscape is OK. But we can definitely do better. Without properly educated men and women, I'm afraid that democracy degrades to either 1) elites stop caring about responsibilities, or 2) demagogues rallying against the elites in 1)
> However, some of these were misleading. I had one running for 15 minutes at 5x, and the third body did eventually return.
That's not misleading. Real three-body orbital systems show this same behavior. Consider that such a system must obey energy conservation, so only a few extreme edge cases lose one of its members permanently (not impossible, just unlikely).
Ironically, because computer simulators are based on numerical DE solvers, they sometimes show outcomes that a real orbital system wouldn't/couldn't.
I'm just saying that, because of energy conservation, an escaping member would need to permanently carry away more than 1/3 of the system energy (for equal-mass satellites). This is possible but unlikely.
An LLM couldn't provide results for a sim like this, compared to a relatively simple numerical differential equation solver, which is how this sim works. Unless you're asking whether a sim like this could be vibe-coded, if so, the answer is yes, certainly, because the required code is relatively easy to create and test.
Apart from a handful of specific solutions, there are no general closed-form solutions for orbital problem in this class, so an LLM wouldn't be able to provide one.
Part of the Gemini 3 Pro marketing release demonstrated that search results can include interactive UI elements like a simulation of the three body problem https://youtu.be/uYQGrK55gxQ?t=21
Yeah, I used Claude Code, definitely started as a vibe-coded thing. First pass was just basic physics + Three.js rendering. But once I saw it working, I spent some more time on better numerical stability and adding presets from stable 3D orbits, so it turned into more of a real project.
> No physics expert but isn't this unpredictable (based on what I saw in series) ?
A three-body orbital problem is an example of a chaotic system, meaning a system extraordinarily sensitive to initial conditions. So no, not unpredictable in the classical sense, because you can always get the same result for the same initial conditions, but it's a system very sensitive to initial settings.
> Amd this does seem predictable, I saw this for almost a minute
The fact that it remains calculable indefinitely isn't evidence that it's predictable in advance -- consider the solar system, which technically is also a chaotic system (as is any orbital system with more than two bodies).
For example, when we spot a new asteroid, we can make calculations about its future path, but those are just estimates of future behavior. Such estimates have a time horizon, after which we can no longer offer reliable assurances about its future path.
You mentioned the TV series. The story is pretty realistic about what a civilization would face if trapped in a three-solar-body system, because the system would have a time horizon past which predictions would become less and less reliable.
I especially like the Three Body Problem series because, unlike most sci-fi, it includes accurate science -- at least in places.
> There are stable solutions. See: Earth’s Moon (or any other planetary moon in the solar system).
Those are not stable solutions. Remember that Earth's moon only came into existence because of a collision with a protoplanet in the past, and if a large enough body passed close by in the future, we might lose our moon -- all because of the complexity of orbital systems with more than two members.
> (or any other planetary moon in the solar system)
There are any number of examples of planets gaining and/or losing moons because of multi-body orbital complexity.
If you are presupposing external perturbations or collisions, it's not an N=3 system... we're talking about the three body problem. A tidally locked system with periodic resonance is permanently stable in the absence of external forces.
> If you are presupposing external perturbations or collisions, it's not an N=3 system... we're talking about the three body problem.
Let me clarify something. A "three body problem" system is any orbital system with more than two bodies. The term "three-body problem" certainly doesn't mean systems with only three bodies.
> A tidally locked system with periodic resonance is permanently stable in the absence of external forces.
No. In an orbital system with more than two bodies, external forces are the name of the game. For such a system, the expression "permanently stable" cannot apply. Such a system is not open to a closed-form solution and all such systems must be modeled numerically.
Closed-form solutions are available for orbits with two bodies, and can sometimes approximate the behavior of systems with more than two, but the reliability of such a model degrades rapidly as time increases, until the predictions become meaningless.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon : "The properties of the orbit described in this section are approximations. The Moon's orbit around Earth has many variations (perturbations) due to the gravitational attraction of the Sun and planets, the study of which [ ... ] has a long history."
> Open to suggestions for additional presets or features!
Anaglyphic (red/cyan) 3D rendering would be nice. I've created a lot of anaglyphic 3D apps over the years, but they're no longer very popular -- I suspect it's the goofy glasses one must acquire and wear.
But a true 3D view of an orbital simulator like this greatly increases its impact and tutorial value.
I do not currently have a set of those glasses so I can't test it, but three.js has this and it's pretty easy to add. There should be an "Anaglyph 3D" checkbox at the bottom of the configuration settings. Let me know if you are able to test it out.
Thanks! I tried the anaglyphic option, but the data being provided to the engine doesn't include third dimension data (so the orbits are essentially flat in the third dimension). Also the orbital colors interfere with the anaglyphic effect (which normally expects white graphic data that it then splits into red and cyan).
I think adding third-dimension data would solve or mitigate the other issues, because full-color anaglyphs are possible, although at a reduced degree of subjective separation between the views.
Thanks for pointing out to me that an anaglyphic option is present, which I managed not to notice the first time.
Anyway, with third-dimension data, the anaglyph option ought to work -- for hard-core, old-fashioned red-blue eyeglass wearers. :)
I just added that option. It wasn’t there when you initially looked :). Are you using one of the 3D presets/random config or are you using a 2D preset? I'll order a set of glasses so I can test. Not very familiar with this so would be fun to experiment.
Thanks for adding it! I think anaglyphs are super underused in 3D visualization. The grid lines look pretty good in 3D but the orbits themselves aren't as sharp - it might be the coloring or it might be that the angular distance between the eye views is too large.
Granted the humorous intent, it's a reductionist outlook. If we were to embrace the premise, then life would be about spawning replacements, or, as is sometimes said, "A chicken is an egg's way to make another egg."
When expressed that way, I must differ. Reproduction per se is the least interesting part of human life. Talking about reproduction is much more interesting ... wait, I think that's called "literature."
Great! Another LaTeX competitor, doubtless "better" for an obscure reason known only to its author. Especially appealing is the fact that, when embedded in a Web page, it must be translated into LaTeX syntax before rendering by MathJax.
The "AsciiMath" name reveals volumes, because prior to rendering, LaTeX code is already ASCII characters meant to represent math symbols. We just didn't call it that.
Oh well, a tempest in a teapot, soon to be forgotten. We can already tell a chatbot, "Show me the tensor equations of General Relativity, and render the result in LaTeX."
It's, in project's words, simple calculator-style syntax (can also call it simplified LaTeX subset or that ad hoc math syntax used in emails but standardized) made to easily embed math on web pages by converting to MathML, with its existence predating MathJax by few years (and even MathJax's predecessor, jsMath). It was never meant to be LaTeX competitor.
With last point, have noticed people most often use this xkcd strip opposite to what it means. It's about when, for a particular use case, one standard/tech/whatever tries to replace all others rather when one standard/tech/whatever attempts to fulfill a distinct use case.
Only among people who don't code. A non-coder doesn't know the difference between a block of code, and a picture of a block of code.
A woman visits the studio of a famous artist. She says, "That woman is all distorted!" The artist replies, "Madam, that is not a woman, that is a picture of a woman."
Many up-to-date messaging environments allow you to copy & paste text directly from your coding environment with indentation and syntax coloring intact. This is something the sender can establish before hitting "Send".
Also, the sender has the option to attaching the source file, which if entered into a coding environment will recreate the syntax colors.
* 28% of U.S. adults are at or below "level 1" literacy, essentially meaning people unable to function in an environment that requires written language skills.
* 54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.
These statistics refer to an inability to interpret written material, much less create it. As to the latter, a much smaller percentage of U.S. adults can compose a coherent sentence.
We're moving toward a world where people will default to reliance on LLMs to generate coherent writing, including college students, who according to recent reports are sometimes encouraged to rely on LLMs to complete their assignments.
If we care to, we can distinguish LLM output from that of a typical student: An LLM won't make the embarrassing grammatical and spelling errors that pepper modern students' prose.
Yesterday I saw this headline in a major online media outlet: "LLMs now exceed the intelect [sic] of the average human." You don't say.
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