NKTgLaw

NKTgLaw

Exploring NKTg Law — A Physics-Inspired Model for Adaptive Behavior in Software

Hello Devtalk community,

I’d like to introduce a hypothetical concept I’m exploring called the NKTg Law—a physics-inspired model to simulate how an entity’s behavior may adapt when its “mass” (i.e., load, state weight, resource usage) changes over time. It’s meant to spark creative thoughts in areas like adaptive systems, concurrency control, or game mechanics, but could be applied anywhere systems respond to changing internal states.


The Core Formulae:
  1. NKTg₁ = x × p, where:
  • x = displacement or deviation from equilibrium (e.g. task queue length, error rate),
  • p = m × v = “momentum” (mass × velocity or throughput).
  • Interpretation:
    • NKTg₁ > 0 → the system is drifting away from steady state (amplifying).
    • NKTg₁ < 0 → the system is stabilizing back toward equilibrium.
  1. NKTg₂ = (dm/dt) × p, where:
  • dm/dt = rate of change of mass (rate of load increase/decrease),
  • p = momentum as defined above.
  • Interpretation:
    • NKTg₂ > 0 → increasing mass (load) boosts motion (e.g., scaling up).
    • NKTg₂ < 0 → decreasing mass (reducing load) dampens motion (e.g., cooldown).

Possible Software Applications:
  • Adaptive Rate Limiting: A service slows down as request load (“mass”) increases, reducing throughput (“velocity”) proportionally.
  • Auto-Scaling Systems: Nodes detect increasing “mass” and spawn additional workers based on momentum formulas.
  • Gameplay Mechanics: Game objects that accelerate when powered up (mass ↑) or slow down when damaged (mass ↓).

Questions for the Community:
  1. Have you encountered or designed systems where state-weighted metrics adjust behavior dynamically (e.g., queue length adjustments, load balancing, memory-aware throttling)?
  2. Would it make sense to encapsulate NKTg logic into a reusable utility—like a behavior or module—instead of sprinkling it across different service components?
  3. What tooling or patterns would help visualize or monitor such dynamics? Could Prometheus, Grafana, or event-driven models illustrate momentum change effectively?
  4. Would you be interested in a small working prototype (e.g., a web service or game engine snippet) demonstrating NKTg Law in action?

Looking forward to hearing your perspectives—and thanks for reading!

NKTgLaw

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

AstonJ
A thread that every forum needs! Simply post a link to a track on YouTube (or SoundCloud or Vimeo amongst others!) on a separate line an...
New
justinjunodev
Figured this would be a cool topic and maybe provide some inspiration for those who are just starting to work from home. Feel free to sha...
New
AstonJ
I just watched this: (tldr: remove bad choices so you don’t need to use willpower) It got me thinking about ways to incre...
New
AstonJ
Inspired by this tweet by @dasdom Even if you take out all the damage being done by humans, our planet has about 50B years before bein...
New
GermaVinsmoke
Do you like to help others on stackoverflow in your free time? And what’s your reputation on Stackoverflow? :smirk::joy::rofl:
New
Exadra37
Kubernetes is everywhere. Transactional apps, video streaming services and machine learning workloads are finding a home on this ever-gro...
New
chaptuck
I am thinking about getting a fitness tracker of some kind (probably one from Garmin). Have any of you developed your own widgets, watchf...
New
AstonJ
00:00 The Year 2022 00:38 Web3 03:28 Metaverse 05:05 AI 06:22 Databases 07:31 JavaScript 09:58 Other Trends to Know WDYT - what wi...
New
DevotionGeo
Hi everyone! I bought this domain name when I was planning to create a website like ElixirSchool.com, but that didn’t ever happen. Now ...
New
AntonRich
I don’t know what happened today. But I just started reading SICP which I meant to do for a long time. The book itself: I’m not even s...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Design and develop sophisticated 2D games that are as much fun to make as they are to play. From particle effects and pathfinding to soci...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
New
AstonJ
Just done a fresh install of macOS Big Sur and on installing Erlang I am getting: asdf install erlang 23.1.2 Configure failed. checking ...
New
AstonJ
Do the test and post your score :nerd_face: :keyboard: If possible, please add info such as the keyboard you’re using, the layout (Qw...
New
Exadra37
Oh just spent so much time on this to discover now that RancherOS is in end of life but Rancher is refusing to mark the Github repo as su...
New
DevotionGeo
The V Programming Language Simple language for building maintainable programs V is already mentioned couple of times in the forum, but I...
New
AstonJ
If you want a quick and easy way to block any website on your Mac using Little Snitch simply… File &gt; New Rule: And select Deny, O...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: VM Brasseur @vmbrasseur We have a treat for you today! We turn the spotlight onto Open Source as we sit down with V...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: Peter Ullrich @PJUllrich Data is at the core of every business, but it is useless if nobody can access and analyze ...
New
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New