Here’s a cool one from years back – it is a video I made in 2009. I was doing some work on pipelines, and we were interested in determining the flow through a directed network. I thought I’m way over my head, when I heard what my friends wanted to do. The algorithm I wanted to try out was called the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm.
On the way back from Las Vegas (I was speaking at a Manifold user conference), I tried to replicate this in Manifold 8 – never expecting it to work, I just tinkered with a few pieces of it. To my surprise it started to work. Then, within an hour, I actually had the application correctly scripted.
I was going to just stop and enjoy the rest of my flight home, but I usually can’t get this stuff out of my head, so I kept going. By the time I landed, I had the application running under different scenarios.
Anyway, here is a video I created when I got off the plane. It shows a very crude, but interesting first step in doing flow apportionment with SQL in Manifold 8.
if you want to learn how to use spatial SQL to do things like this, check out my online video classes at gisadvisor.