IMO the railway analogy works well, because it describes the right dimensionality. It's sort of a 1.5D problem with a directed graph, with a chain of events plu

IMO the railway analogy works well, because it describes the right dimensionality. It's sort of a 1.5D problem with a directed graph, with a chain of events plus a fallback chain. A railway captures that perfectly while giving people a clear picture they can understand, assuming they imagine a train that can only move in one direction and decides its path based on switches on the track. With something like a glider you could ask questions like "but what if it flies off to the East" or "what about vertical air movements that carry it up or down" and so on...