[alanbernstein]

Force directed layout is my favorite for this.

[bagels]

Neat. My n was on the order of thousands, so that would have taken a while, but it could have been cached.

[fjkdlsjflkds]

...but then the algorithmic complexity goes from O(N) to O(N^2), or at least O(N log N), since points have to interact with each other.

(N denotes the number of points you need to generate)

[alanbernstein]

I confess I've never used this in a situation where time complexity was at all relevant. For one thing, it is possible that a result only needs to be computed once for each N (and per shape, since this approach works on a wider range of shapes than just spheres).