nucleation

THEORY-216: On the 2017 r/place log, with coalitions recovered from co-placement, which coalitions survive is barely predictable early from their size, area, start time and colour entropy, the size distribution of recovered coalitions shifts toward large ones as the event proceeds, and some lasting artworks were held by coalitions that kept working under sustained overwriting

4 min read

Properties6
StatusActive
Version3
Tagssocial-science, complex-systems
SourceLIT-1032 — How Millions Coordinate at Scale: Engagement, Collaboration, and Conflict in Three Editions of Reddit r/place
Extended byTHEORY-795 — On a contested shared canvas, the artworks that last are those whose coalitions keep repairing them under continual overwriting, not those left unattacked, as Wu and Silva propose from the 2017 r/place lifecycles
SupportsCLAIM-280 — A pattern can persist while every constituent is replaced and some constituents work against it, as a high-turnover regime of damage and repair, so the persistence of a product and the persistence of the organization producing it are separate facts, CLAIM-273 — A maintained r/place artwork copied from an off-canvas design is a dissipative structure in Prigogine's structural sense, order held only by a sustained flow of repair against rival coalitions and against unaffiliated placement whose rate falls over the event, but its order is imported from the design and not born of an instability, CLAIM-274 — Participation on a shared canvas thins selectively: people keep coming back while art they invested in survives, so unaffiliated corruption falls over the event and the remaining participants are weighted toward maintainers, a cooling schedule the population produces for itself

Graph View

Source

Wu & Silva (2024; v3 2026), LIT-1032, read in NOTE-724: §6 (conflict and predictability), Table 2, Figs. 7–8, Appendices A.3–A.4.

What was actually shown

The 2017 log, 16.6 million updates, is segmented at each of 259,769 one-second snapshots. Pixels are clustered by colour and by embeddings of a graph that links participants who placed adjacent same-colour pixels. The clusters are then chained across time into 39,879 dynamic clusters, the recovered coalitions.

  • Consolidation. At 24, 48 and 72 hours, the size distribution of recovered coalitions shifts toward large ones (Fig. 7).
  • Unpredictability. At 100 random snapshots, a balanced decision tree on start time, area, coalition size and colour entropy predicts whether the coalition’s artwork will keep at least 11% of its peak area. Early F1 is 0.09 and late F1 is 0.67. Random forests, SVMs and Gaussian processes do no better. This could have come out otherwise. Size or an early start could have decided outcomes, and they did not.
  • Persistence under attack. In the illustrated lifecycles (Fig. 8), successful coalitions show collaborative and adversarial actions together throughout. Some failed coalitions match successful ones for long stretches and then collapse. A failed first Mona Lisa was followed by a successful second.

What this does not say

  • It does not show the regime is typical. Persistence under attack is shown in ten chosen lifecycles. A population measure, such as the share of lasting artworks with sustained repair, is not given. This supports CLAIM-280’s existence claim and leaves its defeated_if, mostly unattacked survivors, open. Falmagne et al. (THEORY-214) find that some compositions are safe through neglect.
  • Recovered coalitions are not memberships. They are inferred from co-placement and checked only against final artworks (ARS 0.42). Failed and transient coalitions, the point of the method, have no ground truth.
  • “Unpredictable” is relative to four features. The authors say themselves that alliances, negotiations, coordinated attacks and external communication were not observed. The result is that coalition-state features do not settle outcomes early. It does not show that nothing could.
  • Consolidation is not explained. That large coalitions have advantages under sustained competition is the authors’ suggestion. Large coalitions also waste more actions and have less active members (§5), and no mechanism is tested.
  • It says nothing about equal influence. The heavy-tailed use of the uniform cooldown (§4) bears on CLAIM-272. It is recorded in NOTE-724 as a qualification: unequal influence arises even before coordination, from unequal use of a cap and from automation. It is not part of this account.
  • 2017 only, the least automated edition (0.3% of actions from likely bots, against 17.1% in 2023).

Connections

  • CLAIM-280. Supported weakly, as above. The abandoned and rebuilt Mona Lisa is a product recurring with a different effort behind it, which is the product/producer split. Recovered coalitions could measure that split, but the paper does not.
  • THEORY-214. A complementary result on the 2022 data. There, the abrupt overthrow of a defended image is predictable hours ahead from the image’s own dynamics. Here, eventual survival is not predictable early from coarse coalition features. The two do not conflict. One predicts an imminent event from fine dynamics, the other a final outcome from four static features.
  • QUESTION-169. What this account leaves open: whether lasting artworks as a population were sustained by repair, and whether interaction features restore early predictability. It was this account’s promotion condition until 2026-10-19.

Note of 2026-10-20: the wider claim, filed apart

Under ADR-047 v4, what this entry’s narrowing dropped is filed as its own Proposed entry, so that evidence can later confirm or reject it as a thesis. THEORY-795 carries the thesis that lasting artworks, as a population, are those whose coalitions keep repairing them under overwriting (the source’s claim C6, shown in ten lifecycles). It extends this entry, whose measured or derived content is its evidence. Nothing here changes.

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