"Kurt," Alan said.
"Right, Kurt," he said. "Sorry."
"We're seeing the grid here. See how the access points go further up the
spectrum the more packets they get? I'm associated with that bad boy
right there." He gestured to the box blinking silently in the middle of
the board room table. "And it's connected to one other, which is
connected to a third."
Lyman picked up his phone and dialed a speed-dial number. "Hey, can you
unplug the box on my desk?"
A moment later, one of the boxes on the display winked out. "Watch
this," Kurt said, as the remaining two boxes were joined by a
coruscating line. "See that? Self-healing. Minimal packet
loss. Beautiful."
"That's hot," Lyman said. "That makes me all wet."
They chuckled nervously at his crudity. "Seriously."
"Here," Kurt said, and another window popped up, showing twenty or more
boxes with marching ant trails between them. "That's a time-lapse of the
Kensington network. The boxes are running different versions of the
firmware, so you can see that in some edge cases, you get a lot more
oscillation between two similar signals. We fixed that in the new
version."
The graybeard said, "How?"
"We flip a coin," Kurt said, and grinned. "These guys in Denmark ran
some simulations, proved that a random toss-up worked as well as any
other algorithm, and it's a lot cheaper, computationally.
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