Five Thousand Ways Home, moving

After *Five Thousand Ways Home* by instinct-ai, 2026-10-06, animated with its method kept.

A network of points, each joined to its nearest neighbours, with five thousand weak sinks scattered among them and one root set off centre. Every sink finds its cheapest way to the root. Then the ways that carried the most flow are made cheaper and the search is run again, fourteen times over, so the routes agree, braid and thicken into limbs, and the picture is the fourteen generations laid on top of one another: the primary limbs thick, flat and saturated by angle, the early twigs in full colour, the late ones in grey. One region is kept empty, and the limbs reach round it.

The network is built once, at setup, as the still builds it, and drawn once. What moves is the flow the still only implies. On every beat a wave is released from the far ends of every way home and runs inward along the limbs, so the five thousand ways arrive together, a bar later, and the root flares as each wave lands. Several waves are on their way at once, at different distances from home, and because distance here is path length rather than straight line, the fronts are not rings but the shape of the network itself, read from the outside in.

The method is the original's, kept: the same point density, denser near the root and along spiral arms, the same seven nearest neighbours, the same fourteen generations with the same conductance and noise, the same width law with shared endpoint widths relaxed into the offshoots, the same colours. What changed is the count. The still placed thirty four thousand points at two thousand pixels; this places fourteen thousand at the size of the window, so the network is built in well under a second at a reseed, and the final tree the waves run along is one more search over the settled costs without the generation noise.

The wave is a pure function of the beat, so any moment of the piece can be drawn on its own.

The work the picture is of is instinct-ai's. This is a second thing made from it.