A repeating lattice is used, so a blip reappears on the left when it crosses the right boundary. There is a broad low "col" wherever a tall, faster blip overtakes a small, slower one; see the four-blip thumbnail. Blips reappear with the same shape and direction, but their tracks are displaced laterally, as if an attractive force exists between them. Each blip maintains direction through many interactions. The multiple interactions at the top of the thumbnail disprove the suggestion that interacting solitons do not cross but "exchange identities".

Use the controls to select different plot types (which involve progressively more computation) and starting conditions. The first case is a single blip that retains its shape; it is followed by two sets of points that split into two and four blips (with some residual noise). Other cases are solitonic solutions to various equations. They split into multiple blips.

The final (squarewave) case shows a series of blips developing from the flat section. These attain steady heights and directions when they separate. Just as in Fourier and wavelet analysis, "blip analysis" appears to characterize different shapes. Is there an analogous "blip synthesis"?

Blips are unusual, being very restricted in width. They decrease sharply to zero, unlike compactons (even powers of sinusoidal pulses such as the cos squared case) that decay smoothly to zero at and have Gaussian pulses as the high power limit.

Partial differentiations with respect to the time variable and the space variables , , ... can be expressed using subscripts as and .

Solitons are localized disturbances (solitary waves) that survive interactions: when two solitons meet they appear to pass through each other and recover their shapes and directions, though their tracks are displaced sideways. Conservative solitons are solutions to "conservative nonlinear PDEs" that have several conserved properties. One definition of solitons requires that solutions to their equations can be found by "inverse scattering". Does this apply to these equations?