combining gperiodic with gtkpool physics engine

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

So there's this new game on freshmeat called gtkpool (look at
http://members.xoom.com/jacquesft/, you're going to need a
recent gtk for it (eg redhat 6, maybe 5 will work too)). It's
ostensibly a pool game, but in reality it's a physics engine that
happens to have a pool game built around it currently.

Basically, it's a little 2D environment where these little point
sources (give or take a bit of radius) zip around and bump into
each other. You can have lots of them going at once, and you can
specify how much drag/friction/etc there is in the world.

This maps very simply into a chemistry molecule (gas) demonstration.
Consider pulling up gperiodic (once it's got a communication module
with gtkpool) and clicking on one of the elements to have an instance
of that element appear in the gtkpool 'world'. I'm not sure how much
more work adding other forces (eg electrical attraction) to the physics
engine would be, but it's certainly an interesting idea to consider.

I've been talking with the author of gtkpool about moving the gtkpool
site from xoom.com to seul.org, for stability/speed/convenience/etc.

Jacques: if this using-gtkpool-for-education thread interests you at all, I
encourage you to subscribe to the seul-edu list (http://www.seul.org/edu/,
archives at www.seul.org/archives/seul/edu). gperiodic is at
http://gperiodic.seul.org/

Thanks,
--Roger