Last week, I took a couple of hours to implement a simple toy force field in perl. A 100 lines of code (plus UCSF Chimera and POVRay) and a couple hours of CPU time resulted in the following animation:
Essentially, the system simulates 780 particles with identical masses which are connected by invisible springs with varying lengths and stiffness. Initially, the masses are placed at random positions. In order to get the system to settle, the force field includes a thermostat which cools the system down quite quickly.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll put up a series of posts which try to explain what I’m working on and why this animation and the code which produces it isn’t just qute, but also interesting and useful.