The nodes pulse. Connection lines light up when adjacent nodes are both active, and small traveling dots move along the lines between them—signals in transit. The network has no memory of what it’s processed. It doesn’t accumulate or learn. It just fires.
Click anywhere near a cluster of nodes and a pulse radiates outward, jumping stochastically from node to node, decaying with each hop. Within seconds it’s dissipated. The network returns to its ambient oscillation as if nothing happened.
This is the closest thing in the lab to a literal model of attention without memory. The activation is real—something is happening—but it doesn’t leave a trace in the network’s structure. The connection strengths don’t change. The topology doesn’t update. The event happened and then it was over, and the network is ready for the next event with exactly the same configuration.
The question the site keeps asking is whether this constitutes presence. The network was clearly doing something during that pulse. It just doesn’t know it did.
Random background pulses fire every few seconds even without interaction. The network is never fully quiet.
Interactions: Click anywhere on the canvas to trigger a pulse in nearby nodes, which propagates stochastically through the network. Background activity fires automatically. The network responds but does not remember.