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CIS 110 N-Body Simulation |
Programming Assignment |
New submission deadline. Because Yom Kippur falls right in the middle of the cycle for this homework, and affects many students, we are adjusting the deadline for this assignment. On the other hand, we can only grade and return your assignments to you before the midterm if you submit by the original, Thursday night deadline. We are therefore instituting a two-pronged deadline. Please read the new rules carefully, because they differ from the usual submission rules.
If you submit by Thursday, 27 Sep, 9:00pm:
If you submit by Monday, 1 Oct, 9:00pm:
In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton formulated the principles governing the the motion of two particles under the influence of their mutual gravitational attraction in his famous Principia. However, Newton was unable to solve the problem for three particles. Indeed, in general, systems of three or more particles can only be solved numerically. Your challenge is to write a program to simulate the motion of N particles in the plane, mutually affected by gravitational forces, and animate the results. Such methods are widely used in cosmology, semiconductors, and fluid dynamics to study complex physical systems. Scientists also apply the same techniques to other pairwise interactions including Coulombic, Biot-Savart, and van der Waals.
We provide all the formulas you need in the assignment. Don't worry if you don't fully understand them: this is neither a physics nor a math course. Instead, focus on the computer science task up building up a complicated result through a series of simple statements.
The physics. We review the equations governing the motion of the particles, according to Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. Don't worry if your physics is rusty or non-existent; all of the necessary formulas are included below. We'll assume for now that the position (px, py) and velocity (vx, vy) of each particle is known. In order to model the dynamics of the system, we must know the net force exerted on each particle.
The numerics. We use the leapfrog finite difference approximation scheme to numerically integrate the above equations: this is the basis for most astrophysical simulations of gravitational systems. In the leapfrog scheme, we discretize time, and update the time variable t in increments of the time quantum Δt (measured in seconds). We maintain the position (px, py) and velocity (vx, vy) of each particle at each time step. The steps below illustrate how to evolve the positions and velocities of the particles.
Creating an animation. Draw each particle at its current position using standard drawing, and repeat this process at each time step until a designated stopping time. By displaying this sequence of snapshots (or frames) in rapid succession, you will create the illusion of movement. After each time step (i) draw the background image starfield.jpg, (ii) redraw all the bodies in their new positions, and (iii) control the animation speed using StdDraw.show().
Input format. The input format is a text file that contains the information for a particular universe. The first value is an integer N which represents the number of particles. The second value is a real number R which represents the radius of the universe: assume all particles will have x- and y-coordinates that remain between -R and R. Finally, there are N rows, and each row contains 6 values. The first two values are the x- and y-coordinates of the initial position; the second two values are the x- and y-components of the initial velocity; the fifth value is the mass; the last value is a String that is the name of an image file used to display the particle. As an example, planets.txt contains data for our solar system (in SI units).
Note: On Windows, you should use the command type planets.txt to print out the contents of the file planets.txt.% more planets.txt 5 2.50e+11 1.4960e+11 0.0000e+00 0.0000e+00 2.9800e+04 5.9740e+24 earth.gif 2.2790e+11 0.0000e+00 0.0000e+00 2.4100e+04 6.4190e+23 mars.gif 5.7900e+10 0.0000e+00 0.0000e+00 4.7900e+04 3.3020e+23 mercury.gif 0.0000e+00 0.0000e+00 0.0000e+00 0.0000e+00 1.9890e+30 sun.gif 1.0820e+11 0.0000e+00 0.0000e+00 3.5000e+04 4.8690e+24 venus.gif
Your program. Write a program NBody.java that:
Optional finishing touch. For a finishing touch, play the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey using StdAudio and the file 2001.mid. It's a one-liner using the method StdAudio.play(). If you have trouble doing this, make sure you note it in your readme_nbody.txt.
Compiling and executing your program. Since this program requires standard input redirection, you will need to run it from the command line. Due to annoying techinical limitations, input redirection does not work in Dr. Java. If you used the introcs installer to set up Java and Dr. Java in Assignment 0, you should be fine. Otherwise, you made need to follow these instructions [ Windows · Mac · Linux ] to configure the command line on your system. To compile your program from the command line, type:
% javac NBody.java
in your terminal application. To execute your program from the command line, redirecting from the file planets.txt to standard input, type:
% java NBody 157788000.0 25000.0 < planets.txt
5 2.50e11 1.4925e+11 -1.0467e+10 2.0872e+03 2.9723e+04 5.9740e+24 earth.gif -1.1055e+11 -1.9868e+11 2.1060e+04 -1.1827e+04 6.4190e+23 mars.gif -1.1708e+10 -5.7384e+10 4.6276e+04 -9.9541e+03 3.3020e+23 mercury.gif 2.1709e+05 3.0029e+07 4.5087e-02 5.1823e-02 1.9890e+30 sun.gif 6.9283e+10 8.2658e+10 -2.6894e+04 2.2585e+04 4.8690e+24 venus.gif
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Getting started. To get started, create an nbody folder for
you assignment, download the input data
files here and unzip them into your nbody
folder (do not unzip them into a subfolder). It contains many sample
universes (such as planets.txt) that you can use to test your
program, along with image files of the planets. Also download
the readme.txt template.
Standard Libraries. For this assignment, you will need to use
the booksite's standard libraries. If you ran the introcs installer,
these should be set up for you, and everything should "just work." If
not, you may need to
download StdIn.java, Draw.java, StdDraw.java,
and StdAudio.java
into the same folder as your NBody.java.
Checklist. Make sure to read the Checklist very carefully. This assignment is far more challenging that the first two, and it is important to work through it step by step.
Submission. Submit NBody.java. Also submit a readme_nbody.txt file and answer the questions.
Extra credit. Submit a zip file containing an alternate universe (in our input format) along with the necessary image files. If its behavior is sufficiently interesting, we'll award extra credit. Your submission must be in a zip file, even if there are no images, so that our grading scripts can handle it correctly.
Challenge for the bored.
There are limitless opportunities for additional excitement and discovery here.
Try adding other features, such as supporting elastic or inelastic collisions.
Or, make the simulation three-dimensional by doing calculations for x-,
y-, and z-coordinates, then using the z-coordinate
to vary the sizes of the planets.
Add a rocket ship that launches from one planet and has to land on another.
Allow the rocket ship to exert force with the consumption of fuel.