Wave Function Collapse

Wave Function Collapse (WFC, Gumin 2016) is a constraint satisfaction algorithm inspired by quantum mechanics. Each cell starts in a superposition of all possible tile states. At each step: (1) find the cell with minimum entropy (fewest valid options), (2) collapse it by randomly choosing one option weighted by frequency, (3) propagate the constraint to neighbors using arc consistency. This is analogous to quantum measurement: observation collapses a superposition, and the collapse propagates through entangled correlations. In information theory, the algorithm minimizes Shannon entropy H = −Σ pᵢ log pᵢ.