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Yesterday I saw a pickup game of two-on-two basketball among 4th graders. Good offense, aggressive defense, couple of scores and no fouls. The kids were enjoying a good game. The part that blew my mind was that there was another totally separate game happening in parallel on the same court. Two balls, eight kids and the two games were almost totally oblivious to each other. It was beautiful the way they worked it out.

To an outsider it would have been a mad scramble. The only way I could keep track was that my kid and his buddy were playing a set of twins. If you deleted one set of four kids, the remaining game might proceed kinetically identical regardless.

So naturally I saw it as a data management exercise. There was sufficient bandwidth to handle multiple independent processes, and the processing rules were consistent for each instance.

IF (TeamBallPossession) = TRUE
   IF (PlayerBallPossession) = TRUE
      //attempt to score
   ELSE
      //assist teammate
   END IF
ELSE
   //hinder nearest opponent
END IF

Yes, sometimes it is difficult for a geek to participate in normal life.