race condition

A race condition is when two or more things are happening at the same time and the order in which they happen affects the outcome. Imagine you have two people racing to the top of a hill. It doesn't matter who is first if they are both running at the same speed, but if they are running at different speeds, then the fastest one will get to the top first. That's a race condition. Race conditions can also happen in computer systems when two processes (or pieces of code) are trying to do the same thing and they don't finish in the correct order. This can cause problems in the system and lead to errors.