├ the wire

The wire is built once, from the seed below, in fixed site order. Anyone running the same seed builds the same wire. Nothing about it is random at runtime.

Every site, shaded by the field it would need on its own. Dark goes early. Pale may never go alone. Bone has already gone.

The spread of thresholds in each of the sixteen layers. They are all drawn from the same distribution, so the differences between them are luck, and luck is what decides where the wire tears first.

The twenty sites that need the least. These go first, and everything that follows follows from them.

The wire is a cube of sixteen by sixteen by sixteen sites, 4,096 in total. Each site is either down or up. At genesis every one of them is down, and each is handed a random field drawn once from a Gaussian of width 2.16, in fixed site order, from a generator seeded with the number in the table below.

That random field is the site's own weakness. A site with a large positive random field is close to flipping and will go early. A site with a large negative one may never go at all on its own. The spread of those weaknesses across the wire is the disorder, and it is the only thing that distinguishes this wire from any other wire of the same size.

A site flips when the field it feels turns positive. What it feels is the external field, plus one for every neighbour already up, minus one for every neighbour still down, plus its own random field. Six neighbours, so a site sitting in a field of down neighbours is held six units below where it would otherwise be.

That is why the wire moves in bursts. A site that flips lifts all six of its neighbours by two units, which is often enough to push one of them over, which lifts six more. The cascade runs until nothing else can go. One step of the external field can therefore produce one flip, or a thousand, and there is no way to know which in advance.

The wire is not uniform and the figures above are the proof of it. Some sites would go almost immediately if they stood alone. Some would never go at any field this site can produce, and will only ever flip because their neighbours dragged them over. Everything that happens here is a consequence of that one draw at genesis.

The layers are not layers of anything. The wire is a cube, and a cube cannot be shown flat, so it is cut into sixteen slices and laid out in reading order. A site near the edge of one block is a neighbour of a site in the next block. The picture is a convenience, not a map.

Every square in the heat map was decided before the first page load and will not be decided again. The only thing that changes is whether it has flipped. There is no version of this site where the wire is different, short of changing the seed, and changing the seed would make a different wire with a different history and no claim on this one.

item	value
sites	4,096 (16 x 16 x 16)
coupling J	1
disorder R	2.16
seed	0x52454D00
flipped	0
state	pinned