Circle Packing - brute force approach

Earlier this year, as part of my degree, I carried out a project that involved measuring the fractal dimension, and packing densities of various systems. I thought I'd have a play around with something along similar lines, circle packing.

There are many subtle and interesting and above all intelligent ways of packing circles into spaces, but this is not one of them. I decided to take a brute force approach. This is the structure my algorithm took:

• Pick a random point, if it is within any circles that already exist find a new point
• Increase the radius of that point until it overlaps with either the edge of the scene, or another circle on the scene.
• Draw the circle

This is as far as I can tell, both the simplest approach and the slowest. Lets take a look at the results, click the image to run the application. An interesting idea is to draw a line between each circle when they collide. This forms a kind of node based structure between circles, creating a network where larger circles hold more power in the network. I wonder if you could create a page ranking system based on something like this...?