[phi-go]

Interesting algorithm, thanks for sharing. I was wondering what the connection of Wave Function Collapse is to constraint solving, since it seems to do very similar things. Looks like there was a paper written on this topic: "WaveFunctionCollapse is Constraint Solving in the Wild". Still need to read it, though.

[jerf]

There's no "connection". This is constraint solving. The supposed connection to quantum theory in the name is spurious, as that is not what superpositions are, nor is it how nature resolves them, nor is it even particularly defendable as an "approximation". It's something else entirely.

It is what it is now, but when you see people like me grumbling about the name, this is basically why.

It's like all those "I built a monad library!" posts that in fact haven't even come close, they're missing half-a-dozen critical properties of monads, all they can do is "Maybe" or "Either", and then someone else sees that library and thinks that's what "monads" are and pass the confusion down even farther in the next generation of "monad" libraries. Words mean what people use them to mean in the end, but there are still some meanings sometimes worth at least trying to defend.

[phi-go]

Thank you, I was kind of expected this. I can understand your frustration, the name is definitely misleading.

Sorry for another ignorant question. Does WFC have a corresponding algorithm name in constraint solving literature? The paper I mentioned partially reimplements it using answer set programming which seems to be closely related to SAT solving.

[jerf]

I don't know if it has an official name; in that space it would just be a trivial variant of searching the tree (or graph, depending on how you look at it) defined by the constraints by taking random paths through it and backtracking if you get stuck.

Perhaps another angle of frustration with the name is that people apply the Quantum WooWoo to the algorithm and go all "whooaaaa" when it fact it's basically the first thing you might think of when solving a constraint problem.

Which is not to say that is a bad thing. Putting the "simplest solution to this class of problems" into your toolbelt is a good thing. That's why a lot of schools cover things like A* search and linked lists; in the real world you often need some elaborations but there's also plenty of problems you can solve with them as-is and it's a good starting point. It's just the conceptual interference from the name that is a bit annoying.

[quantadev]

Every time you locate something in space and/or time, it means a wave has collapsed. So that statement is as trivial as saying "constraints are about positions of things in space time." It's about as enlightening as saying "clocks tick" or "rulers have numbers on them."