One way of overcoming this inefficiency is to partition the domain into cells of edge length smaller than formula_1. The pairwise interactions are then not just computed between neighboring cells, but between all cells within formula_1 of each other (first suggested in and implemented and analysed in and ). This approach can be taken to the limit wherein each cell holds at most one single particle, therefore reducing the number of spurious pairwise distance evaluations to zero. This gain in efficiency, however, is quickly offset by the number of cells formula_32 that need to be inspected for every interaction with a cell formula_33, which, for example in three dimensions, grows cubically with the inverse of the cell edge length. Setting the edge length to formula_34, however, already reduces the number of spurious distance evaluations to 63%.