Attractlets reading page · no basin · supplied

The Block

A 2×2 still life that persists by doing nothing at all.

No basin

On this site a basin is the set of conditions a system comes back from: push a marble inside a bowl and it rolls back to the bottom. The Block has no basin. It is a fixed point, a pattern of four live cells in a 2×2 square that the rules leave unchanged from one step to the next, so it stays put only because nothing disturbs it. Press Perturb the block and it does not recover: it breaks, or it sits in its new state. Nothing in it pulls it back to the square.

Article IV of the Laboratory's Constitution requires every runnable panel to expose a basin, a perturbation and a recover-or-rupture readout. A panel that cannot expose a basin is a reading page, and it must say so. This panel has the perturbation and the readout and no basin to expose, so under Article IV it is a reading page: persistence with no return, for the other attractlets to be measured against.

The Block

dead equilibrium · pays nothing

live cells,

changed last step,

sitting still, costs nothing, does nothing

Survives because the substrate is gentle. A 2×2 block is a fixed point: it persists by doing nothing at all. It has no basin, perturb it and it does not recover, it simply breaks or sits. This is the framework's dead-equilibrium null case (the crystal/flame row of the sovereignty test): persistence without payment.

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