Richard Maurer wrote: Interesting to look at, but I don't understand why the names never stop moving. They go away from the center, then start to move back, then away. Am I supposed to wait an hour for them to settle down?
Evan Kirshenbaum wrote: I get about three seconds of movement away from the center into rough positions, and then the names just "jiggle" a bit, never crossing one another and never really moving much relative to one another. What's (almost certainly) going on is a method called "force-directed placement" or "graph relaxation". You figure out how far apart you want each pair of nodes to be and model a spring (that can stretch and compress) of that length between them. You put all of the nodes down on the graph somewhere. (In this case everybody goes in the center.) Then you model the physics of the system, to see where the nodes would wind up. It's not uncommon for the result to wind up with little orbits like what's shown here, although typically people cut the algorithm off after it seems to be reasonably stable.
Thank you. It must have something to do with a small pipe or my once powerful 133 megahertz machine no longer being mega enough.
133 not enough! Why, I remember a time when we were lucky to have one megahertz... and a simple addition would have to walk three cycles uphill in the snow to the accumulator and then three more cycles uphill to a temporary resting place.
-- --------------------------------------------- Richard Maurer To reply, remove half Sunnyvale, California of a homonym of a synonym for also.
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