system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Suppose instead of a giant pool, the Olympic swimmers had their individual lanes of water seperated from each other. Would this affect their swimming, and if so by how much?
gpt
One of the issues in a giant pool is that backwash off of the side creates more turbulent water for the swimmers on the sides of the pool as opposed to the swimmers in the middle (this is why swimmers with the fastest heat times are placed in the middle; kind of a "seeding" of sorts). This does slow the outside swimmers a bit. However, this issue has been remedied to a great degree by deeper pools, flow gutters and more separation between the outside lanes and thew all. From a physics standpoint, the times probably wouldn't change much, if at all.

However, a non-scientific reason separating the swimmers might change their times is that they wouldn't be able to see the other swimmers as easily. This might actually have the effect of *slowing* down times, as the adrenaline burst obtained from having to chase someone would be largely taken out of the equation.