literature-review

My college physics thesis was a simulation and analysis of a system of close-packed spheres. Specifically, I was looking what crystalline structure arises in the system as the density of spheres increases, which is a small part of the grand question, “How do objects freeze?” Several weeks ago, I picked up my thesis to see if I could understand it better, and came to the realization that I did nothing correctly. Therefore, I’ve added to my ever-growing list of projects a complete rewrite of my thesis, to recitfy the fact that it was complete bullshit. Furthermore, after discussions with Kevin, we realized there may be a simpler method of system structural analysis than the proposed method, and I wish to expand my analysis to include the new metric, and to see if there are any correlations that may be drawn from the two structure metrics.

Google Wave (sadly deprecated) has pioneered a lot of what drives modern-day Google Docs, Slides, etc. in terms of an OT framework – thankfully, the project has led to a series of whitepapers discussing the technologies present in Wave, and even more happily, the original source code was open-sourced.

In the process of implementing Cormack’s correction to the dOPT algorithm, I’ve come across several other papers which provide a more complete background of operational transforms and may be of use in the future. They are listed here for sake of documentation – a review of these papers will be provided once I read them carefully.

What follows is an overview of a 1989 journal article by Ellis and Gibbs regarding collaborative editing. It is the origin of the use of operational transforms. For me, it is particularly useful as the dOPT algorithm for reconstructing a cohoerent global state is introduced here. The global state, in the case of the concurrent text editor, is the contents of the document. In more complex scenarios, the state can consist of much more ill-defined properties – in the case of Google Docs, the state would consist of not only the document text, but also the style rendered (bold, italic, etc.). Indeed, much of the work in finally implementing a robust operational transform framework was actually done while developing Google Wave.