Three phenomena impact these calculations: These are not orthogonal. With small enough Δt and enough precision the chaos would not cause trouble. Chaos matters when we want to know the outcome of the infinitely precise initial conditions. This is not a pratical issue.

In this note I will quantify precision as significant bits. 32 bit IEEE floatingpoint format (float in C) provides 24 significant bits and 64 bit format (double) provides 53. The extended precision of the Pentium provides 64 significant bits using the C construct “long double”. Chaos increases the sensitivity of the calculation to initial conditions more than for two body problems. I have not yet gained evidence that we have computed to the encounter that indeed expels a lone mass. Chaos together with either truncation or rounding make ...


The Lipschitz conditions are met except upon mass collision. This ensures that almost all initial conditions yield exactly one solution. See Picard’s Theorem. I have code to compute the Lyaopnov coefficient.