intent sent
8 B
A seed plus your strokes. Each stroke is five bytes: where, how wide, what.
Intent in, world out
Paint a few strokes. Each one is a constraint, not a picture: it says there is stone here, and nothing about anywhere else. The sampler then builds a whole world that obeys every constraint at once and is physically consistent everywhere between them. What travels is the intent. What arrives is the world.
history
material
The physics of this world, and it travels in the link too
Twelve numbers decide what kind of world this is. Six say how each material answers gravity; six say which pairs like to be next to each other. Change them and you are not editing a picture, you are editing the rules the picture has to obey. Every one of them is in the link.
world received
96 KB
512 × 512 cells, six materials, three bits each. The raw field, before any compression.
amplification
12,288×
World out over intent in. This is the number that belongs to this medium; a codec cannot report it, because a codec is given the world.
world fingerprint
—
A hash of every cell. Two devices that agree on this link agree on the world. If you are reading this on some other machine, that string is the whole report.
your constraints held
—
Every painted cell is still what you painted after the world settles around it.
Press same intent, new world. The strokes are honoured exactly and everything else is different. That is the property worth naming: the intent is invariant and the realization is not. A compressor cannot do this, and not because it is worse at it. It is given a particular world and asked to return that same world; being handed an intention and asked to invent a world consistent with it is a different job. the thing to say about the number above is that it is not a compression ratio and should never be compared against one.