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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to 2D Coulomb Gas Simulator

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 I originally made this for my Bachelor's thesis to create pretty pictures and build intuition but have recently gotten it a fresh coat of paint and better performance curtesy of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.

The 2D Coulomb Gas Simulator is an interactive tool for exploring a mathematical physics concept called the 2D Coulomb gas. Originally created for a Bachelor's thesis to visualize and understand the topic, the… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

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    2017 · htmlpreview.github.io · its alternatives →

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    Had some fun with shared array buffers over many months of free time. Skip to the end to play around with the final app. Open to ideas on how to simulate more whilst staying in js land.

    2024 · dgerrells.com · its alternatives →

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    Interactive notes for algebra based physics with explorable explanations

    2020 · landgreen.github.io · its alternatives →

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    This is a small particles simulation that can run either with WebGPU (GPU Compute) or with the CPU, and it can be changed in real time

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Hi HN, I’m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game. Here's a simple runthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-moBz6upU. I pushed to get through a full product pathway to show the V-804 replay. I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied…

    Mar 2026 · fuelingcuriosity.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8AS

    I really like the look of the famous album art for Unknown Pleasures [1]. It was originally created by Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory from the signals of the first discovered radio pulsar [2]. I made a spectrogram that produces a similar look. It runs FFT in Rust and visualizes it with WebGL. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnknownPleasuresVinyl.jpg [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1919%2B21

    2024 · aestuans.github.io · its alternatives →

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    I am excited to announce the launch of my e-book on Graphics/WebGPU programming! This project has consumed much of my spare time, during which I developed various tools to facilitate the publishing process, including a code playground and a static site generator that can reference sample codes. However, I'm feeling burnt out and ready to call it finished, even though it may not feel completely done. Avoiding another abandoned side project has been my primary motivation in reaching this point.

    2024 · shi-yan.github.io · its alternatives →

  11. 11IM

    Hi HN, I made some animations of the most important kinds of transistors using my semiconductor simulation, details of which are on the page. I tried to make the visuals as realistic as possible while also aiming for clarity. If you want to go beyond the charge carriers and look at, for example, the electric field, you can do so in the simulation software. The desktop software also has less common devices like IBGTs and SCRs that have similar animations. The last thread about my software was posted here about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43942279

    Jul 2026 · brandonli.net · its alternatives →

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    This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang. It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    2016 · ghostinthecode.net · its alternatives →

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    I started teaching my daughter physics by showing her how things actually work - plucking guitar strings to explain vibration, mixing paints to understand light, dropping objects to see gravity in action. She learned so much faster through hands-on exploration than through books or videos. That's when I realized: what if I could recreate these physical experiments as interactive simulations? Lumen is the result - an interactive physics playground covering sound, light, motion, life, and mechanics. Each module lets you manipulate variables in real-time and see/hear the results…

    Jan 2026 · projectlumen.app · its alternatives →

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    Fluid simulation in liquidfun-wasm

    2021 · birchlabs.co.uk · its alternatives →

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    A prototype implementation of cloth simulation. It uses the soft body dynamics support in ammo.js.

    2020 · playcanv.as · its alternatives →

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    SimPhy▲83

    Physics and math simulator for teachers and students

    2021 · simphy.com · its alternatives →

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    I wanted to make the simplest app to introduce myself and others to quantum computing. Introducing, Schrödinger's Coin. Powered by a simple Hadamard gate[0] on IBM quantum, with this app you can directly interact with a quantum system to experience true randomness. Thoughts? Could you see any use cases for yourself of this? Or, does it inspire any other ideas of yours? Curious what others on HN think! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate#Hadamard_ga...

    2025 · quantum.orgsoft.org · its alternatives →

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    Lighter web automation with Python. Contribute to mherrmann/helium development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Pure C# 3D real time physics simulation library, now with a higher version number. - bepu/bepuphysics2

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Context: I'm looking at Norman Wildberger's rational trigonometry[1], and here I was wondering how useful it is in physics. So I thought about testing it with the famous simple pendulum exercise. It's not obvious we get any FPS gain, but still I find it cool to even be able to get the same result differently. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_trigonometry

    2016 · grondilu.github.io · its alternatives →

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    WebGPU tech demo running in modern browsers showcasing various rendering techniques like deferred rendering with 400+ dynamic lights, Hi-Z screen space reflections and cascaded shadow mapping.

    2024 · gnikoloff.github.io · its alternatives →

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