The step, as it runs
Lineage
State
You are not what was made. You are what was not removed.
One constraint-satisfaction system on a 64×64 periodic lattice, run at three values of chao. Sixteen edge-matching tiles. Each cell's energy, summed over its four neighbours:
E = (edge mismatches) − J·σᵢσⱼ/4 + μ·degree
σ is the tile's phase — whether it carries flow across or down. The first term wants a coherent weave. The second splits that weave's degeneracy into two ordered states, so there is never one right answer, only two that cannot both win. The third is a standing cost per flow path: ink is something the system can only afford when chao pays for it.
Moves are accepted with probability min(1, exp(−ΔE/χ)).
Chao is the only thing that differs between the three panels. Density,
coherence and domain size are not settings — they fall out of it.
That is what makes these one machine and not three.
III quenches and freezes with defects — cells still frustrated where the fronts collided. Those coordinates are hashed to seed I. I's state at sweep 512 is hashed to seed II. The defects are drawn as holes, at identical lattice coordinates in all three panels. III seeds I, so the triptych is a cycle and not a sequence.
Click a panel to hold it alone. Drop the rate to a few proposals per frame and the machine slows to the scale of one decision at a time. Every state is a function of the seed, so a still and the running process are the same object named two ways.