This is just an excellent visualization to explain a concept that is hard to imagine.<p>Lots of difficult concepts are actually very simple once you boil them down to the fundamentals and visualize them.<p>This has big implications for education. Many concepts like derivatives in finance, algorithmns in computer science are suprisingly simple.<p>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".<p>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.
Also a great way of visualizing some basic problem with concurrency.<p>Gridlock is excellent demonstrated as above, if you are putting things in a queue for a thread that is taking <i>forever</i> 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.
I like how dynamics of complex systems are getting so captivating and easy to understand by visually simplified simulations rather than mathematical expressions.<p>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.
So fun. For kicks, I just spent more than a few minutes trying to find a semi-steady equilibrium where, say 80% to 90% of cars are temporally stalled without pushing the system into total gridlock.<p>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. :)