The motion is an accurate simulation of things you may have been studying in physics or mathematics, called a parabola. You might have learned the mathematical formula for a parabola, and be wondering how the ball can be following a parabola when there's nothing in the code that looks anything like the right formula.
What we're doing is called a discrete simulation of the physical universe. It's how most games work.
(Some philosophers suspect the entire universe is just a simulation running in a supercomputer somewhere, and the physical quantity known as “Planck Length” is its pixel size. There’s even a fairly elegant line of reasoning to show that this is probably the case. But do your homework anyway.)
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