whfast: a fast and unbiased implementation of a symplectic Wisdom–Holman integrator for long-term gravitational simulations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present whfast, a fast and accurate implementation of a Wisdom–Holman symplectic integrator for long-term orbit integrations of planetary systems. whfast is significantly faster and conserves energy better than all other Wisdom–Holman integrators tested. We achieve this by significantly improving the Kepler solver and ensuring numerical stability of coordinate transformations to and from Jacobi coordinates. These refinements allow us to remove the linear secular trend in the energy error that is present in other implementations. For small enough timesteps, we achieve Brouwer's law, i.e. the energy error is dominated by an unbiased random walk due to floating-point round-off errors. We implement symplectic correctors up to order 11 that significantly reduce the energy error. We also implement a symplectic tangent map for the variational equations. This allows us to efficiently calculate two widely used chaos indicators the Lyapunov characteristic number and the Mean Exponential Growth factor of Nearby Orbits. whfast is freely available as a flexible C package, as a shared library, and as an easy-to-use python module.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it