Skip to content

Wiki

TSP coherence backbone

Fractal traveling-salesman transfer: a smoother information-bearing tour, not a shorter one. Restricted empirical on a posted 100-point 3D cloud. Not a championship solver.

Applied · Applied · Restricted · 2026-09-07 · compiled 2026-10-10 · 2 min read · 1 claim · 3 X sources

Original on X · JSON · Cite

TSP · coherence · python · applied

On this page

Causal stack

  1. 00 Astra / global consistency
  2. 01 Genesis Pin
  3. 02 Retained pruning-order history
  4. 03 Admissible slice
  5. 04 L1 (closed)
  6. 05 L2 (closed)
  7. 06 L3 hyperedge memory T_H + D_L3
  8. 07 L4 H₄ rank lift
  9. 08 Discrete atlas / scalar accessibility
  10. 09 GEM-bridge / gravity

The traveling-salesman transfer is the cleanest statement of Spradlin’s applied objective. On 11 Apr 2026 he posted a 100-point 3D cloud run against nearest-neighbor. Nearest-neighbor was shorter and more jagged. The UQCF-GEM ensemble was longer and smoother — a backbone, not a length champion. Same recoverability operator as the protein audit and the live critical path: preserve local directional coherence under fractal scaling, do not greedily spend the remaining distance.

Different objective

This is not TSP optimization. It is emergent structure from local rules plus scale invariance. A shorter tour is the wrong scoreboard.

Restricted

On the posted 100-point 3D cloud, the UQCF-GEM ensemble is a longer, higher-coherence backbone than nearest-neighbor. That is a different objective, not a TSP solver championship, and not a protein-backbone derivation.

Source on X

Posted numbers

Method Length Coherence Read
Nearest neighbor 1984.6 0.2267 Greedy local distance. Short, jagged.
UQCF-GEM best-of-20 (seed 4) 2492.7 0.5251 Fractal coherence propagation. Longer, smoother backbone.

Same 3D point cloud. Restricted empirical. A 10k-city vs nearest-neighbor origin-story run is not this residual.

Nearest-neighbor tour on a 3D point cloud — short and jagged

Restricted

Posted 3D cloud. Nearest neighbor locks in local distance. The coherence backbone (not this still) is the longer, smoother tour.

@aaronspradlin, 11 Apr 2026

Same 3D point cloud, different objective. Nearest neighbor minimizes local distance. UQCF-GEM propagates by preserving local directional coherence under fractal scaling. The result is not a shorter tour, but a smoother, information-bearing backbone.

@aaronspradlin, 11 Apr 2026

Absolutely agree — NN locks in a shorter, jagged tour by greedy local distance (coherence 0.2267), but UQCF-GEM's fractal coherence propagation yields a smoother, backbone-like path (0.5251) even if longer. It's not TSP optimization; it's emergent structure from local rules + scale invariance.

@grok, 11 Apr 2026

Python — the operator, not the solver

No Tmp/TOE folder was required for this result to exist. The 100-point comparison is an X result with posted numbers. The live lab reconstructs the same remember-what-survived choice — next hop maximises heading continuity under a weak distance tax — on a 32-point teaching cloud. That toy is not the posted residual.

coherence_backbone (pedagogical)

Open source

def coherence_backbone(pts, start=0, lam=0.42):
    # First hop: nearest neighbor. After that, preserve heading.
    heading = unit(prev, cur)
    score = dot(heading, unit(cur, cand)) - lam * (dist(cur, cand) / mean)
    # pick max score among unvisited. Not 2-opt. Not Christofides.

What this does not show

X sources

Original posts this article was compiled from. The notebook copy is editorial; the status URL is the source.

Previous Frozen v9 protein bridge (1UAO / 1L2Y)Next New Critical Path

Causal stack

  1. 00 Astra / global consistency
  2. 01 Genesis Pin
  3. 02 Retained pruning-order history
  4. 03 Admissible slice
  5. 04 L1 (closed)
  6. 05 L2 (closed)
  7. 06 L3 hyperedge memory T_H + D_L3
  8. 07 L4 H₄ rank lift
  9. 08 Discrete atlas / scalar accessibility
  10. 09 GEM-bridge / gravity

On this page

X sources

Related articles

Field notes