2D Coulomb Gas Simulator
Details
- External ID
- 47039044
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- 2D Coulomb Gas Simulator
- Website domain
- github.io
- Launched
- Feb. 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 44
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7978436657681941
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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 I originally made this for my Bachelor's thesis to create pretty pictures and build intuition but have recently gotten it a fresh coat of paint and better performance curtesy of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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- —
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- 2d coulomb gas simulator
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 118 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #41 of 119 (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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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.