[zachallaun]

From my reading of the docs, Automerge will arbitrarily pick a "winning" document in the case of a conflict, but guarantees that the same winner will be chosen if the merge were to occur, for instance, in a different order:

    // Pretend doc1 and doc2 are already Automerge objects
    let doc1 = { x: 1 }
    let doc2 = { x: 2 }

    // x will be either 1 or 2 (arbitrarily chosen), but
    // res1 will always == res2 regardless of choice
    let res1 = Automerge.merge(doc1, doc2)
    let res2 = Automerge.merge(doc2, doc1)
    
    res1 == res2 // true

However, there may be cases where you want to manually resolve conflicts, and if that is the case, the `_conflicts` property is there so that you can undo whatever merge occurred automatically and set the "winner" yourself.

[bb88]

The more interesting case is when you have the following:

doc1 = { 'a': {'b': {'c': ... }}}

doc2 = {}

So one has been deleted entirely and the other has modified some attribute deep down inside of it.

If you always have to check and resolve conflicts yourself, then it's not really useful.

[heynk]

If it's "arbitrarily chosen", but the result is always the same regardless of order, what is the algorithm that decides?

[zachallaun]

There's different ways you could do it, like calculating some hash of the value and picking the one with the greater value. If the hash function is good, then you get an "arbitrary" result that would still be consistent regardless of order.