Now that it's not late at night I can see a mistake: the primary benefit of regularization in nbody methods (self-influence being zero and not infinity) is stab

Now that it's not late at night I can see a mistake: the primary benefit of regularization in nbody methods (self-influence being zero and not infinity) is stabilization of the dynamics. A close pass will not send one or both particles shooting out into the void with excessive energy. The second advantage is removing the conditional in the inner loop.