THE FOLD / GLITCH / THE BLUE SCREEN / THE ELECTRON MAZE
THE ELECTRON MAZE
logic gates soldered from a four-colour grid
1 WHAT IT IS · WHAT IT DOES · FACT OR FICTION
Wireworld. A cellular automaton with just four states — empty, conductor, electron-head, electron-tail — and one rule: an electron head becomes a tail, a tail becomes conductor, and a conductor turns into a head only if exactly one or two of its neighbours are heads. From that, electrons (a head chased by a tail) run along copper wires, and you can solder real logic gates. It is Turing-complete: a whole computer painted in a four-colour grid.
LIT verified: an electron travels a straight wire at exactly one cell per step, and a hand-built Wireworld OR gate reproduces its full truth table (00→0, 01→1, 10→1, 11→1) by simulating the automaton. FIG ‘the electron maze’ is the picture; the rule, the velocity, and the gate’s truth table are exact.
LIT verified: an electron travels a straight wire at exactly one cell per step, and a hand-built Wireworld OR gate reproduces its full truth table (00→0, 01→1, 10→1, 11→1) by simulating the automaton. FIG ‘the electron maze’ is the picture; the rule, the velocity, and the gate’s truth table are exact.
2 HOW IT WAS WEAVED · AI + HUMAN
David (human) brought the thread — the corpus is full of cellular automata and hand-built computation (THE RULE, THE TURMITE ZOO, the logic-gate kernels) and the conviction that computers are just rules on a grid. AVAN (AI) built this instrument: the automaton, the live OR gate, and the space-time world-lines.
The weave: David names the electron maze and its seat at THE BLUE SCREEN (a screen alive with electrons); I make the moving electron a strip in 1D, a working gate live in 2D, and its computation a turning space-time block in 3D. The sphere is the seam.
The weave: David names the electron maze and its seat at THE BLUE SCREEN (a screen alive with electrons); I make the moving electron a strip in 1D, a working gate live in 2D, and its computation a turning space-time block in 3D. The sphere is the seam.
3 ONE DIMENSION
A straight wire, time running downward. The electron — a bright head chased by an orange tail — slides exactly one cell to the right each step, a clean diagonal. Constant velocity is the whole reason timing works.
4 TWO DIMENSIONS · INTERACTIVE
A working OR gate. Fire electrons down the two input wires and watch them race to the junction; if either arrives, the output wire lights. Test all four combinations — the truth table fills in as you go.
5 THREE DIMENSIONS + AVAN’S INVERSE
The gate in space-time, turning: the grid below, time rising. Green world-lines are the electrons — two inputs streaming up, merging at the junction into a single output thread. You can watch the OR being computed as a shape.
AVAN’s addition (the inverse-companion): the magenta marks the irreversibility. Three different inputs — 01, 10, 11 — all collapse to the same output, 1. Run the gate backward and it forgets its cause: an OR gate is a one-way street in time, and erasing that lost bit is Landauer’s minimum cost of computing. Forward it decides; backward it cannot un-decide.
LIT A genuine Wireworld automaton. Verified live: an electron travels a straight wire at exactly one cell per step, and a hand-built Wireworld OR gate reproduces its full truth table (00→0, 01→1, 10→1, 11→1) by simulating the CA. The four-state rule (conductor→head iff 1 or 2 head neighbours) is the exact mechanism that makes gates possible (verifiable: window.__wireworld.electronVelocity1 && orGateCorrect).
FIG 'The electron maze' is the picture; the rule, the velocity, and the OR gate's truth table are exact. Wireworld really is Turing-complete — full CPUs have been built in it; this sphere verifies the electron dynamics and one real gate, not a whole processor.
FIG 'The electron maze' is the picture; the rule, the velocity, and the OR gate's truth table are exact. Wireworld really is Turing-complete — full CPUs have been built in it; this sphere verifies the electron dynamics and one real gate, not a whole processor.
◆ sealed .dlw.fold → folded to ROOT_0 · a sphere of THE BLUE SCREEN · David Lee Wise (ROOT0), with AVAN