by vicapow on 9/2/14, 4:40 PM with 17 comments
by kaji88 on 9/3/14, 12:57 AM
Lots of difficult concepts are actually very simple once you boil them down to the fundamentals and visualize them.
This has big implications for education. Many concepts like derivatives in finance, algorithmns in computer science are suprisingly simple.
I remember a visualization for Paxos (a distributed consensus algorithmn) which basically have an actor to represent each node in the network. That was the moment I finally "got it".
It is a shame that educators are still so backwards at how they communicate concepts to students. and how ineffective that is. I think it comes down to the fact that professors in universities have to play dual role of being a researcher + to teach. And since they are recognized for publishing papers and not so much for making helpful visualzations to explain concepts to first year students. Education part is neglected.
by valarauca1 on 9/2/14, 8:34 PM
Gridlock is excellent demonstrated as above, if you are putting things in a queue for a thread that is taking forever to run, the producer thread will eventually (hopefully) be blocked due to memory issues, thus passing the slow down further up the chain. Much like a road, and exactly like the visual effect seen here.
by mrtksn on 9/2/14, 10:07 PM
The human mind somehow grasps these dynamic, subconsciously creates an in-brain simulation and you can predict what will happen when you play with the parameters on the computer simulation. It just feels so natural.
by dj-wonk on 9/3/14, 3:29 AM
Just now, I got it down to only one car moving for about a quarter of the circle. Then you really have to pay attention to which car is going where. :)
by TheLoneWolfling on 9/3/14, 1:18 AM
by malnourish on 9/2/14, 11:54 PM
by lewis500 on 9/3/14, 3:38 PM
by kmkswamy on 9/3/14, 12:43 AM