Re: The actual quote from the Post AAS article

[srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian)]

>It seems to me that the complexity of an ATC system would increase similarly
>to the N-body problem from physics.  An example of such a problem is to
>predict the motion of an electron travelling through a distribution of 
>charges.  If memory serves, that problem is O(X**n) where N is the number
>of charges and X is the number of electrons.

   N-body problems in physics, under many conditions, can be numerically
handle without the combinatoric explosion of calculations due to 
interparticle forces (for example, gravitational problems can be simplified
for cluster like problems using trees where the nodes are center-of-masses,
while electrical problems like in quantum mechanics can be simpligfied
using generalized potentials).
   Unfortuantely, none of these procedures works with planes, so that there
is little analogy to be made.

Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimization
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Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimiztion
P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178