The earliest heuristics of force-directed placement were based on the spring embedder model [QuBr79, Ea84]. Nodes are considered as mutually repulsive charges and edges as springs that attract connected nodes.
Let 
be the distance vector between two nodes v and w.
Then, 
is the Euclidean distance.
Between each pair of nodes, there are repulsive forces inversely proportional
to the distance, e.g. the force vector
Between nodes connected by edges (v,w), there are attractive forces directly proportional to (a power of) the distance, e.g.
Different formulas for forces have been used in [QuBr79, Ea84, SuMi94, SuMi95],
but the resulting effects are always similar.
The parameters 
and 
allow to adapt the
heuristics.
An edge (v,w) is at equilibrium if 
.
The length of the edge in this case is
Figure 1: Animation of Spring Embedding of Grid Graph
Although the algorithm does not explicitly support the detection of symmetries, it turns out that in many cases the resulting layout shows existing symmetries. If the iteration steps are animated, there is the impression of a three-dimensional unfolding process starting with a randomly produced bunch. The more symmetric a graph is, the more obvious is this effect. Fig. 1 shows the animation sequence of a regular grid graph.