At least one of the differences between flowcharts and these dependency charts is that dependency charts are nondeterministic; that is, at a given point in time, you aren't just at one state. In the example given, you can be both at "unlocked door" _and_ "found oil can". This is unlike a flowchart in that a flowchart explicitly has a single state pointer.<p>Ironically^1, this is somewhat similar to dataflow programming, where you have nodes, edges, and you can require multiple incoming edges to fire before the node does.<p>[1] The irony is that flowcharts are not the analogue to dataflow programming.