lesser infinities

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Statement:

Entropy locking as a technique is all about lesser infinities. You might have previously heard about Hilbert's Hotel, a thought experiment about infinity. In it, we imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, which is totally full of an infinite number of guests. Then, more guests show up, infinitely more. How will we fit them into the hotel if all the rooms are full? Well, it's simple. Basically we move all the guests in room N to room 2N. Now, all the odd-numbered rooms are empty. We simply put all the new infinite guests into the infinite number of odd rooms, and once again our infinite hotel is full.

To make entropy locking work well, I use similar principles. Instead of designing the generative space with the mindset of starting from small rules, and building up gradually, keeping the entropy low and controlled... I do the opposite. I use small, simple rules to build a complex system with far too much entropy: the generative space is infinite but it is TOO infinite, and all the outcomes look rather noisy. Next, I implement an entropy lock, and then I start including carefully designed "random" bottlenecks at various points in the generative algorithm. The entropy locking is like the trick in Hilbert's Hotel where we shift all the guests in room N to room 2N. Suddenly, after entropy locking, our infinite space is much much smaller... but still infinite, and still random.

Each piece in this series lives in its own lesser infinity, generating cycles which seem interesting to us only because they are less than what they could have been.

Thanks for reading :)
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