what can you do

L and I have been working on a crash bug in a flash game.  He was finally able to fix it.  Here is what he said.

L: so you know what the problem was?

  the composition

me: the

  what

  as in, how the movie clips were grouped?

L: yeah!

  i just went into the fla

me: Nice.

L: went thru most of the symbols, and ungrouped, broke apart, and flattened stuff

me: once again I find myself flabbergasted.

L: it was pretty crazy... the art was imported from illustrator, but sometimes, there were 10+ layers of groupings inside of groupings, and some symbols had 100+ groups inside of groups

me: huh, yeah.

  I guess I'll try to keep an eye on that in the future.

Forget everything you know, or think you know.  All that you require is your intuition.  Or, when a person works with a complex system long enough, they develop an intuition about how the system behaves, that is parallel to and sometimes contradictory to how they know system is supposed to behave.  This intuition can be valuable, but it's not the kind of thing you can talk about in polite* company.  See: mysticism.  

*where by polite I mean rigorous.  Reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem has been been good and bad for me.