Conclusion and Final Project
Congratulations on finishing the tutorial! Now that you have obtained the basic knowledge in N-body simulation, it is time for you to make your own project! (If you are interested)
There are so many things you can do with N-body simulation. Below are some possible ideas, but you can also come up with your own project.
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Game: You can make a simple game using N-body simulation. (In fact, I made a game called OrbitSim when I first started learning Python and N-body simulation.)
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Rewrite the code: You can rewrite the code in C / C++ or your favorite language and compare the performance. You can also try to use Numba or Cython to speed up your code in Python. Maybe write your own N-body simulation library?
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Large-scale simulation: So far, we have only focused on systems with a few objects. What about large-scale systems with thousands or millions of objects? Turns out it is not so easy because the computation of gravity scales as \(\mathcal{O}(N^2)\). Have a look at Barnes-Hut algorithm to see how to speed up the simulation. In fact, we have documentations about it on this website as well. You may try to implement it in some low-level language like C or C++.
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Reproducing observations: If you are not interested in writing low-level simulation code, you can still do some interesting projects using our
grav_simproject written in C. One example is reproducing the Kirkwood gaps in our solar system.
Good luck and have fun!