What is virtual parent selection in Kaspa?

Virtual parent selection is how Kaspa's consensus system decides which blocks to treat as parents when building the virtual state. When a node constructs the virtual state — a synthetic tip representing the current agreed-upon state of the blockDAG — it picks parent blocks from a pool of candidates, but keeps the resulting mergeset (the collection of blocks being incorporated) below a fixed size limit. That cap exists because including too many parallel blocks at once would cause the work of ordering them in consensus to grow unwieldy and slow the network down. For a beginner, this means Kaspa has a built-in balancing mechanism that lets it absorb many simultaneous blocks while keeping the computation required to reach agreement manageable.