Gridlock vs. Bottlenecks: A visual explanation
setosa.io
setosa.io
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.
* create content that matches required outcomes for the course
* have assessments that measure leaner competency in the content
* account for different learning styles and teaching styles that may be required
* assessments and training techniques adequately account for people with learning difficulties
Almost all the lecturers I had literally sat in the classroom, faced the projector wall, and read out the word-heavy slides.
We then had a final exam worth 75%-90% of our grade.
Calling them educators is laughable.
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.
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.
The fun stuff is that queuing theory applies to all sorts of things like packets and getting seats on an airline. Lots of fun to play with.
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. :)
The lead bus has to stop for longer to pick up waiting passengers than the following bus. The less time the following bus has to stop, the closer it gets to the bus in front, so the less time for new passengers to accumulate. And so on down the chain.