Difference between n-body collision detection and pairwise collision detection?

Question

I'm confused as to the difference between the two. I thought they were both the same but I'm reading some papers that focuses more on solving the n-body collision detection problem over the pairwise collision detection problem. What are the differences?

Answer 1

Pairwise collision detection is a base case of n-body collison detection. Papers which focus more on n-body collisions apply pairwise collision concepts to general cases; so they really are conceptually almost the same thing.