Bill Roper's Journal

Julie demonstrated that she could swim the length of the deep end of the pool today, which meant it was time to go have a discussion with the lifeguards at the pool about allowing her to go down the drop slides and the platform dive. They agreed that she should be ready and she went down the slide with a good deal of gusto several times and then off the lower platform dive.

Things were fine until she went off the enclosed drop slide and became disoriented and tried to swim to the wrong ladder. This ultimately resulted in a lifeguard going in after her which meant the end of drop slides for today.

But she did really, really well otherwise. (And I've seen adults swim to the wrong slide too.)

It turns out that the correct term for the method that I've been using to arrange the calculation sequence in our product is a topological sort. This works perfectly well when single-threaded, but I'm hacking at it now to try to eliminate some problems that have crept in as I try to multithread the calculations. The problem is that I'm trying to avoid adding a monstrous amount of overhead...