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For ball-to-ball collisions, 6 is already a highly conservative estimate-- this is basically a chaotic system (outcome after a few iterations, while deterministic, is extremely sensitive to exact starting conditions).

The error scales up exponentially with the number of (ball-to-ball) collisions.

So if the initial ball position is off by "half a pixel" (=> always non-zero) this gets amplified extremely quickly.

Your intuition about the problem is probably distorted by considering/having experienced (less sensitive) ball/wall collisions.

See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JehyrC6W3YTtdxw6S/a-primer-o...



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