Generator

The count halves the moment the tie is broken

A generator in the flat-folding library, called 11 times across 5 essays. Below: what it draws at its defaults and at the arguments the essays give it, what it checked while drawing, and everywhere it is used.

sector-ties is one function. Everything below came out of it during this build, at arguments taken from the essays rather than invented for this page — so a figure here is the same figure a reader meets in an essay, and when the generator changes, this page changes with it.

At its defaults

The count halves the moment the tie is brokenHow many mountain-and-valley assignments a degree-four vertex admits, over a family in which the two smallest sectors stay equal, and then at a vertex a tenth of a degree away from that family. The tied family holds twice as many throughout, and the fall is a step rather than a slope.8, with the tie4, without it0the two smallest sectors, kept equalfoldable assignments of one interior vertexthe dashed line is a vertex 0.1° off the family: the lemma wakes up and takes half of them

view: "sweep", from: 30, to: 89.9

The count halves the moment the tie is brokenHow many mountain-and-valley assignments a degree-four vertex admits, over a family in which the two smallest sectors stay equal, and then at a vertex a tenth of a degree away from that family. The tied family holds twice as many throughout, and the fall is a step rather than a slope.8, with the tie4, without it0the two smallest sectors, kept equalfoldable assignments of one interior vertexthe dashed line is a vertex 0.1° off the family: the lemma wakes up and takes half of them

view: "sweep", from: 45, to: 89.9, samples: 60

The count halves the moment the tie is brokenHow many mountain-and-valley assignments a degree-four vertex admits, over a family in which the two smallest sectors stay equal, and then at a vertex a tenth of a degree away from that family. The tied family holds twice as many throughout, and the fall is a step rather than a slope.8, with the tie4, without it0the two smallest sectors, kept equalfoldable assignments of one interior vertexthe dashed line is a vertex 0.1° off the family: the lemma wakes up and takes half of them

view: "vertex", a: 45

A tie is where the lemma stops speakingTwo degree-four vertices, both developable and both satisfying Kawasaki. On the left one sector is strictly smaller than both its neighbours and the big-little-big lemma forbids half the labellings; on the right the two smallest are equal, the lemma has nothing to say, and twice as many labellings survive.117°45°63°135°one smallest sectorthe lemma constrains one pair4 foldable assignmentsof the 16 markings135°45°45°135°two smallest sectors equalthe lemma constrains nothing8 foldable assignmentsof the 16 markings

What it checked while it drew

Collected by running this generator with a listener on the assertions, not written here. The count is how many separate times this build put that claim to the test.

Where it is called

Changing this generator changes every figure on this list, which is what makes the list worth publishing rather than keeping in a check script.

A tie is not a decision

The crimp reduction decides a vertex by folding its smallest sector away, and where two sectors tie for smallest it has no forced move and must try each of them. That search is not rare — on the vertex at the centre of the first base anybody folds it happens for fourteen of the sixteen letterings — and it has never once changed the answer.

The dial that decides nothing

Turn a twist tessellation's angle from one fence to the other and every measurable thing about it changes: the smallest sector goes from 88 degrees to under one, the pleats swallow a quarter of the sheet and then almost none of it, the folded footprint changes by a third. The number of ways it can be creased does not change at all — sixteen, at every angle tested — because the lemma reads which sector is smallest and never how small.

The order decides the count

Ask how many mountain-and-valley letterings a vertex admits and the answer looks as though it should depend on the angles. It does not. Three of the four conditions never see an angle at all, and the fourth asks only which sector is smallest — so the count is a function of a combinatorial arrangement, and a walk round the cycle that never looks at a vertex reproduces it exactly.

Walking between two foldings

The letterings a vertex folds in are always counted and never navigated. Counting says a generic degree-six vertex has eight of them; navigating says that changing any two creases turns any one into any other, and that changing two neighbouring creases does not — and that the vertices which come apart are the ones with no coincidences in them, which is the opposite of what every other measurement here would suggest.

Where the lemma says nothing

The big-little-big lemma asks for a sector strictly smaller than both its neighbours, and the word doing the work is strictly. At a vertex whose two smallest sectors are equal the lemma has no opinion at all — and those are the vertices origami actually uses. The count of markings the conditions admit doubles, discontinuously, at exactly the angles everybody folds.

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