A pair walked in both directions is a 2-cycle in the edge set; the
longest-path relaxation loops through it and inflates every downstream
depth toward the node-count cap, dragging other relays hard against the
ends (a one-hop relay landed at x=0.09 instead of its natural 0.33).
Rank balanced_x over the graph with each such pair merged to one
representative — the acyclic flow the picture really is; the pair, drawn
as a single vertical, rightly shares an x anyway.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 4.8
25922efb0b