Randomly placing N circles in rectangle without overlapping

Question

I want to place N circles with given, common radius in the rectangle of given size, such that circles are not overlapping in Python. My current solutions are:

1) to create a set of every point in the space and remove from it points that will cause overlapping before generating next circle (but it's slow when the rectangle is big).

2) to draw the center of balls from the set of not-overlapping points (e.g. every 2r + const) (but the positions are not random enough here).

Do you have other, more efficient ideas?

Answer 1

so the most efficient packing in 2D is hexagonal packing and you can just hard code your program to give that packing for circles

read more about it here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_packing