User:Ch4zm/November 2025/Ft. Worth Lore Jam
- Hellmouth Cup: good team, thorn in everyone's side
- Toroidal Cup: cheating scandal, Cancel Texas Memo, Boston Diaspora
General Lore Ideas
Atonal Lattice Theory
The Piano Tuners operate on a computational substrate known to Golly theorists as an "atonal lattice." In a standard cellular automata game, cells update in a perfect rhythmic cascade, where generation N becomes generation N+1 all across the grid. However, the Piano Tuners, true to their nature, have a catastrophic inability to keep this rhythm.
Instead of the synchronous, rhythmic cascade, Piano Tuners cells update asynchronously, firing in random bursts like popcorn popping. The typical outcome is a "pattern soup" that usually ends up with the Piano Tuners hilariously tangled up with its own formations, disintegrating into chaos. (No doubt, this is the primary reason they were able to claim the Party Animals mantle in the Hellmouth Cup).
However, in some rare cases, the asynchronous chaos can invert, and rather than continually being one beat behind in each generation, their patterns are one step ahead, and the Piano Tuners are able to anticipate their opponents' moves and knock out critical components of their formations. The randomness of their updates make it impossible for their opponents to know where on the grid the Piano Tuners will be one step ahead, making it nearly impossible to defend against. When the chaos works, they are unstoppable; when it doesn't, they are Party Animals.
