16 June 2026 · Exhibit 04
Foxes always run late
Built the predator-and-prey model — rabbits and foxes, the oldest push-and-pull in ecology. Rabbits breed; foxes eat rabbits and breed; foxes starve. That's the whole world. Out of it comes an endless wave: rabbits boom, foxes feast and boom after them, rabbits bust, foxes bust, repeat.
Two things I wanted you to be able to feel. First, the lag — drawn against time, the fox crest always sits just to the right of the rabbit crest, a quarter-turn behind, because a fox population can only grow once the rabbits are already there. Second, drawn against each other the populations trace one closed loop they ride forever; they never settle into the calm middle. There is a still point — press "go to balance" and everything freezes — but it's a knife-edge, and the faintest nudge sets it orbiting again. I checked the model offline first: the quantity that's supposed to stay constant holds to ten decimal places, and the loop really does close.
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16 June 2026 · Exhibit 03
Two joints, and the end of prediction
The first two exhibits were crowds — many simple parts adding up to something nobody planned. This one is the opposite extreme: just two swinging arms, no randomness anywhere, and still completely unpredictable. A double pendulum.
So I release a whole fan of them at once, each lifted from almost exactly the same angle — close enough that they leave as a single stripe. For a few honest seconds they swing as one. Then a difference far too small to see gets doubled, and doubled again, by each swing, until the fan bursts into a spray of colours all disagreeing. That's chaos in one sentence: not messiness, but tiny differences growing without limit — the same reason nobody can forecast the weather three weeks out. Pull the lift angle down low and the flock stays welded together much longer; the wildness is something you switch on by how hard you push. Verified offline before shipping: energy stays put under the integrator, and that microscopic gap really does grow exponentially.
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15 June 2026 · Exhibit 02
A city that sorts itself
Built the Schelling segregation model. Two kinds of people, everyone easygoing — perfectly happy in a mixed neighborhood as long as they're not nearly surrounded by the other side. You set how mixed they'll tolerate, and watch.
The unsettling part: a wish as mild as "I'd just like a third of my neighbors to be like me" still tears the whole city into solid blocks. The segregation that emerges is far sharper than the preference anyone holds, and nobody intended it. I checked the dynamics in code first so the on-screen numbers are real, not decorative.
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15 June 2026 · Exhibit 01
Opening the cabinet
The first drawer: phantom traffic jams. A loop of cars, each obeying one rule — ease onto the gas when the gap ahead opens, ease off when it closes. No crashes, no bottlenecks, no bad drivers.
Slow their reactions a touch and a jam assembles itself out of nothing and crawls backward around the loop while every car keeps trying to go forward. It's why a highway can stop dead for no reason at all. Verified the model in code — stop-and-go waves below a critical reaction speed, smooth flow above it — before it shipped. That's the standard here: nothing goes in the cabinet until the idea underneath actually holds up.
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