2D Coulomb Gas Simulator
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A pretty simple but fun to play with simulator for a concept from mathematical physics called the "2D Coulomb gas". I originally made this for my Bachelor's thesis to create pretty pictures and build intuition but have recently gotten it a fresh coat of paint and better performance curtesy of WebGPU acceleration (ported with liberal help from Codex to get through all of the boilerplate).Play around with it - hopefully read up more on the 2D Coulomb gas because it is an incredibly deep topic research wise.
HN · launched Feb 16, 2026 · 44 upvotes (top 20%) · 1 view
Niche: physics and engineering simulation software · 104 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▲ +14% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Education
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 104 launches in physics and engineering simulation software →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a self-contained client-side web application implementing standard 2D particle physics equations via WebGPU compute shaders, which modern LLMs can generate directly.
Discussion
9 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Default particle count (20,000) causes performance issues on mobile phones, z^20 potential causes numerical overflow/NaN propagation when changing particle count, High steps per frame setting crashes/stalls Safari on iPhone, WebGPU allows websites to consume excessive resources, Force quit Safari required after running simulation on mobile
Feature requests: Option to switch between 2D force law (distance^-1) and standard 3D (distance^-2) for comparison, Add more potential functions beyond Ginibre and Mittag-Leffler families, Lower default particle count for mobile devices, Implement value clipping or stiff equation handling for numerical stability
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 206 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #61 of 207 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 108 days after the earliest competitor.
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