Prometheus

A collection of small, visual Python demos exploring AI, algorithms, and software engineering concepts — built to be screen-recorded and shared.

Each demo lives in its own dated folder and includes:

• the runnable Python script
• caption.txt — the write-up used when posting
• HOW_TO_RUN.txt — plain-language setup and run instructions

Demos

• 2026-09-22 — 0/1 Knapsack: Dynamic Programming — a dynamic programming table fills in live, cell by cell, to solve the 0/1 knapsack problem, then a glowing backtrace trail sweeps backward through the finished table to reveal exactly which items were chosen.
• 2026-09-17 — Electric Field Lines & Coulomb's Law — point charges generate a live electrostatic field via Coulomb's law and superposition, rendered as color-graded field lines with traveling pulses plus a stream of glowing test particles that feel the real force and curve through the field in real time.
• 2026-09-15 — Sorting Algorithms Race — Bubble Sort, Insertion Sort, and Quicksort race the same shuffled array at the same fixed decision rate, using neon value-gradient bars, swap particle bursts, and per-column stats to make O(n²) vs. O(n log n) directly visible.
• 2026-09-10 — Decision Tree Growth — a CART decision tree grows live on a 2D checkerboard dataset, animating each axis-aligned Gini-impurity split as a glowing sweep and color-washing regions by class purity.
• 2026-09-08 — Spring-Mass-Damper: Damping & Resonance — four damped-harmonic-oscillator systems (mx'' + cx' + k*x = F(t)) run side by side via RK4, contrasting underdamped, critically damped, and overdamped return-to-rest behavior against a fourth, continuously driven lane whose amplitude swells live as the drive frequency sweeps through resonance.
• 2026-09-03 — Convex Hull: Gift Wrapping — the Jarvis March algorithm builds a convex hull around a scattered point cloud one edge at a time, animated as a rotating radar-style beam that sweeps candidates by angle and locks in each winning vertex via a cross-product test.
• 2026-09-01 — Elastic Gas Thermalization — a box of particles split into fast "hot" and slow "cold" halves collides elastically after a divider drops, conserving momentum and kinetic energy exactly while the speed distribution converges live onto the theoretical Maxwell-Boltzmann curve.
• 2026-08-27 — Gradient Descent: Learning a Linear Separator — a logistic-regression perceptron trains live via gradient descent on binary cross-entropy loss, rendering its confidence as a glowing cyan-to-magenta field with a bright seam at the 50/50 decision boundary that slides into place between two data clouds.
• 2026-08-25 — Double Pendulum Chaos — a fan of double pendulums released from starting angles a fraction of a degree apart, integrated with real Lagrangian mechanics via RK4, visibly tearing apart into chaos as sensitive dependence on initial conditions plays out live.
• 2026-08-20 — Dijkstra's Shortest Path: Animated Edge Relaxation — a priority-queue-driven shortest-path search over a random weighted graph, with settled nodes colored by a cyan-to-magenta heat gradient as the distance wavefront spreads from the source and a comet particle traces the final shortest-path tree.
• 2026-08-18 — Genetic Algorithm: Evolving Creatures — a population of creatures, each carrying a fixed steering genome, evolves across generations via elitism, crossover, and mutation to route around obstacles and reach a target, with color shifting from cold blue to hot gold as fitness improves.
• 2026-08-13 — Wave Interference — two glowing point sources emit circular waves that sum by pure superposition, producing live constructive hot spots and the dark hyperbolic nodal lines behind Young's double-slit experiment.
• 2026-08-11 — Recursive Backtracking Maze Generation — a randomized depth-first search carves a perfect maze in real time, with corridor hue mapped to recursion depth and a gold finale tracing the maze's longest path.
• 2026-08-06 — N-Body Gravity Simulation — true N-body gravity (every body pulls on every other body via Newton's law) with glowing trails, producing chaotic, never-repeating orbital paths from a heavy central body plus several lighter ones.
• 2026-08-06 — Self-Attention Visualization — the Transformer self-attention mechanism (softmax of scaled query-key dot products) rendered as glowing lines between sentence tokens, featuring a coreference example where "it" attends back to "cat".
• 2026-08-04 — Q-Learning Grid World — a reinforcement-learning agent learns, from step-cost/hazard/goal rewards alone, to navigate a walled grid to a hidden goal, with a live Q-value heatmap and policy arrows showing the route emerge.
• 2026-07-30 — Ant Colony Optimization — four simulated ant colonies race along different-length paths to food, using pheromone deposition and evaporation to converge on the shortest route with no central planner.
• 2026-07-28 — Boids Flocking Simulation — emergent flocking behavior from three simple local rules (separation, alignment, cohesion).