"Chambers" <bdc### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> "triple_r" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> > Isn't that more of a positive* feedback loop, where a perturbation reinforces
> > itself?
>
> Possibly; in the contexts I've seen it used, a negative effect reinforcing
> itself has been referred to as a negative feedback loop.  However, calling it a
> positive feedback loop is, unintuitively enough, logical.

Forgive me--I wasn't being facetious when I said it depends on your definition
of positive.  Sounds like it's just a matter of convention in all kinds of
fields where it's used.  My undergraduate
yeah-I-took-a-course-in-that-so-I-must-be-an-expert experience is that you call
anything destabilizing a positive feedback loop whether that makes any sense or
not...  But the whole course was really just one specific case where angles are
defined so that that's always the case...

> The funny thing is, using a fixed timestep is supposed to "fix" the problem of a
> dynamic timestep :)

As long as you're taking the largest time step possible.  If not, then dynamic
timestepping should catch that and increase the step, allowing even fewer
iterations.  I guess you're right though.  It may make more sense here to
sacrifice some accuracy rather than framerate.  Just as long as you don't leave
the stability domain.

 - Ricky

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