As noted elsewhere, an animation is created through changes in our world from one frame to the next. The amount of change should be chosen so that the transitions between frames is smooth. Once we decide on that value, any smaller value will slow down the animation while larger values will speed up the animation. Of course, when picking larger values, there may be a point where the smoothness of transitions is lost and the animation appears jumpy.

For our problem, we are using numberOfPartitions in computing the new radii values. Since numberOfPartitions is a divisor in this computation, the sizes of the radii change inversely to the changes in numberOfPartitions -- that is, as numberOfPartitions increase the changes in radii become smaller and the animation slows down while decreasing numberOfPartitions causes the animation to speed up.