Today’s stream was different from previous ones, as I had my second guest and we worked together to look at some code and discuss a tricky algorithm problem.  Microsoft MVP Iris Classon joined me and we discussed a very complex problem she is attempting to solve.

The problem we discussed and looked at surrounds the processing of various calculations.  The following rules are defined for these calculations:

• A calculation depends on a parent calculation that it is defined with
• A calculation can trigger zero to many other calculations
• We need to minimize allocation of calculations, and the number of times a calculation runs
• The calculation as currently defined have recursion, and we want to allow the recursion to execute at most 3 times, before stopping the recursion and outputting a warning message

This hierarchy of calculations is easy to manage with a dozen calculations… but now they have thousands and scale is a problem.  Watch the video above to see our discussion of this problem and see some of the pseudo-source code Iris wrote to test a potential solution.

I’m taking Tuesday off for the Christmas holiday, but will be back on Thursday.  Saturday the 30th I will be an in-arena announcer for my daughter’s horse show event, so I will not have a stream that day.  Join me again on Tuesday the 2nd for the next stream after that.