Christian Grieger <chr### [at] triplexde> wrote:
> I've got a little problem: i want to arrange a number of little
> spheres (or dots) on the surface of a big sphere. The tricky thing
> is that they should have all the same distance to each other.

  There's only one arrangement of 4 points which meets this requirement:
The vertex points of a regular tetrahedron. (Technically speaking it's
also possible with 3 points, placing them at the vertices of an equilateral
triangle).
  It's not possible to arrange more than 4 points in such a way that the
distance is equal between them.

  Of course you didn't mean this, and thus your definition is wrong.
What you meant was something like an arrangement of points such that
the distance from a point to n of its closest neighbour points is always
equal.
  Unfortunately this isn't possible but for a very limited amount of
points (basically regular polyhedron vertices and perhaps a couple of
other shapes).

  What you want is an algorithm which tries to maximize the distance
between the points on the surface of a sphere. Even though it's only
an approximation, it usually looks good enough. The other replies should
help on this matter.

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

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