Quantum Particle Layout Generation with Plasma Dynamics

If that has ever been a title, the writer probably cried. Unfortunately, this post is about nothing as interesting (though comes from some interesting research into forces between atoms). The main point of this post - put some of my ideas down so I don't have to keep thinking over them.

• The problem: dynamic graph drawing is the changing and visualisation of a graph in interactive time (or as close to as possible)
• Most techniques for smaller graphs are derived from Eades and Sugiyamas work (essentially a Spring Embedder which outputs vertex positions to a plotter after each iteration)
• For small graphs, this works well because the vertex movement can be calculated between animation slides. Large graphs - not so lucky, the higher number of force calculations requires more time and cant be fit between animation slides
• In practice, instant changes to a graph are bad as the reader does not have enough time to follow what is happening - for smaller graphs (9cube) a time dilation of about 200ms per iteration is required, for larger graphs (55grid) FDP takes too long (and without Multilevel, the layout is awful anyway)
• Typical "easy" response from me would be to run MGF on a graph, and after a change (or collection of changes), reapply MGF, outputting the new layout to an additional time frame
• This doesn't quite work for two reasons - 1. takes too long (essentially generating an entirely new layout per time slice - so not really a time slice, more of an iterative layout thingy) 2. the vertices do not gradually move into new positions, and so between frames, there could be a very different graph
• You could alter the FDP technique to cut down the number of calculations required (as a good layout is already applied, it just needs to be altered), or even cut out all calculations in the multilevel scheme so only the final (original) graph is altered
• This brings us to the dynamic matching - how many levels before layout suffers during the coarsening process, similarly, how many levels required change as a result of FDP before the layout suffers 
• This suggests that inevitably, a layout will have to be generated for a large graph through typical static graph drawing techniques. Only the original graph is then a concern - until you wish to start updating the approximation structure (again dynamic matching)
• Can the levels still be used to approximate forces if the higher levels are not having their positions updated? How slow will this be to visualise?
• The dreaded cooling schedule - everything above is all well and good, however, visualisation of the cooling schedule in action shows large amounts of movement (oscillation of vertex positions) - Veldhuizen uses "damping" to reduce this effect, so its assumed we could do the same (assumed...)
• Considering the cooling schedule is so limiting, another approach would be to change this (that way we can really see whether MGF is better or worse than the Octree in terms of which converges first)

Cant really think of much more as I now have to change the printer ink (talk about interrupting a train of thought...) but I will no doubt update this list when I can think of more things. Good news though, this already answers a few of the questions I had for myself.