Algodoo

Mechanical Engineering is not my area of expertise, and so some of what is discussed in this scene is over my head. BUT, I can clearly see that you did an excellent job of creating a scene that works well, and has a good narrative. Therefore, I can say without the slightest reservation: WELL DONE!

Thanks Xray.

Well, I don't understand a single slice of this but because of the enormous effort put into this, I must give 10

It was an interesting idea to test it in Algodoo.

You should know that Algodoo tends to add or substract some really minor values to/from floats. For example, if you set a float to 0.25, in some cases algodoo forces it to be 0.24999995 or something like that. Those programming inaccuracies plus variable storage limitations give you non-perfect results.

I guess that Algodoo is accurate enough to be used to experiment such things.

Also while playing around with this thing I noticed that you can in fact reach algodoo's step limit. That's when the random movement is smaller that the smallest possible step algodoo calculates. The wire then sits completely, 100% still.

It looks like it's a little more than 3e-9 of a meter which is 3 nanometers (about the width of a DNA helix). I wonder how could you use such accuracy.

Cathier - I don't know this for certain, but it's possible (and I dear say, probable) that the developer of Algodoo used a purchased math package which would include floating point calculations. Software based floating point always has some level of ambiguity in its results because of the limited precision of the calculations. So, for example, when you expect a calculation result to be 0.25000, and it displays 0.2499999, it is the fault of the purchased math package and not of Algodoo the simulation program. This is actually quite common, from my own experience.

Thanks for the comments and ratings guys.

Regarding "I wonder how could you use such accuracy.", Algoryx routinely uses this level of accuracy or better for software that simulates and predicts real world dynamics. This saves a lot of time and effort when designing new products.