DCP Tutorial #6 — Distributed Double Pendulums
Published:
Tutorial #6 in the Distributive Compute Protocol (DCP) series, packaged as a Google Colab notebook.
The double pendulum is the classic example of deterministic chaos — small differences in initial conditions diverge exponentially. This notebook computes many of them in parallel:
- Input set — initial polar angles and angular velocities of the blue and red planets, one row per pendulum.
- Work function — derives the equations of motion via the Lagrangian formulation, integrates, and converts to Cartesian coordinates for visualisation.
- Output — animated trajectories showing how nearby initial conditions diverge over time.
Each pendulum is computed by a separate DCP worker (browser, CLI, screensaver, or container), making this a clean demonstration of embarrassingly-parallel scientific computation on volunteer-style distributed compute.