@HDE226868 One good rule of thumb is that any question which ceases to make sense when you remove the code blocks is off topic here.
The thing that appears in our help center is that questions about implementation details are off topic here. Other computational physics questions may be on topic.
Sure. I'm working on a program in Python that integrates the equations of stellar structure using a fourth-order Runge Kutta method. I was wondering if, in this particular application, there's a significant advantage to using higher-order RK methods (I know that RK4 is by far the most common).
@HDE226868 OK, well... that's borderline. The chances of it being on topic are high enough IMO that you could just post it and see what happens, but I think it might fit better at Computational Science
Likely the increase in accuracy from decreasing the time step is going to be a lot more significant than the difference between RK4 and higher-order methods
But I guess I can't really say without knowing the details
But yeah, this is easy. In particular, you could test with a variety of step sizes (like $h$, $h/2$, $h/4$, etc.) with RK4, RK6, and RK8, and see (1) whether they approach the same solution as you extrapolate $h\to 0$, and (2) whether the rate at which they approach that solution depends on the order of the method
In theory, the error of an n'th order method should scale as $h^n$
@NeuroFuzzy I'm just doing it for fun. I've been learning Python and also reading Schwarzschild's text on stellar astrophysics, so I decided to combine the two.
Is there a procedure wherein we can go through questions without an accepted answer and, as a community, vote to mark one of the existing answers as good enough?
I ask this because @Danu previously suggested "answer the unanswered questions" sprints, and while I like that idea, I'd rather do it if there were a way of getting stuff marked as accepted.
Recently, I have answered a few questions that were upvoted by factors more than the accepted answer, but not accepted. This one, at the time of my writing, has an accepted answer that the asker said was not what he wanted. I don't know why. In the future, when people view this, people might only...
