
Last modified 29 July 2008

Billiard King, by Rich Schwartz.  
This program has 2 main functions.

1. To explore outer billiards on kites.  A kite
is a quadrilateral with bilateral symmetry.

2.. To demonstrate my monograph, 
"Outer Billiards on Kites", which proves
(among many things) that outer billiards
has unbounded orbits relative to any 
irrational kite.

Earlier versions of Billiard King also illustrated
my first paper on outer billiards, having to do
specifically with the Penrose kite.  I have now
removed these features, and placed them in a
separate program that deals specially with the
Penrose kite.  I made this change because the
main version of Billiard King was getting uwieldy.

*****


You need a Java compiler to compile the program.  
You compile it using the command

javac *.java

Once you have compiled the code, you run it by typing

java BilliardKing 

This will cause 6 windows to pop up:

1. a documentation window  (read this first!)
2. a main control panel (killing this window kills the whole program.)
3. the Tiling window.
4. the Arithmetic Graph Window
5. the Torus Partition Window
6. the Penrose Partition Window

Except for the main control panel, these windows are
all resizeable.  All the control panels have little
question boxes. If you click on the question boxes, you
can read the documentation about the functions
associated to the control panel.

*****

The directory /Extra has some additional code that was once part of
BilliardKing.  I've pruned away this code and put it aside for
possible later use.  Some of the code would take some massaging
before it would actually work with the current version of the program.
