By the way, because it's helpful to have a name if you want to do a literature dive, the optimisation problem this is solving is called the Thomson problem. It

By the way, because it's helpful to have a name if you want to do a literature dive, the optimisation problem this is solving is called the Thomson problem. It was originally formulated in the context of the lowest energy configuration of electrons restricted to a sphere under electrostatic repulsion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_problem