D4 Triality

Triality symmetry, 4-byte structural constraint
symmetryencoding-invariantdim 44 metrics

What It Measures

Whether 4-byte structural patterns respect the Spin(8) triality symmetry.

Takes each group of 4 consecutive values and projects them onto the 24 roots of D4 — the vectors ±eᵢ ± eⱼ in 4D space. D4 is the only Lie algebra with triality: an order-3 automorphism that cyclically permutes three fundamentally different representations of Spin(8). The geometry asks: does the data's root usage look the same after applying this triality rotation? If so, the data has a structural symmetry that only D4 can detect.

Metrics

triality_invariance

How symmetric is the root distribution under the triality automorphism? 1.0 means the distribution is unchanged by the permutation. Critical circle map scores 0.63 (highest in the atlas): its dynamics at the golden-mean rotation number create 4-byte patterns with near-perfect triality. Circle map quasiperiodic (0.62) and phyllotaxis (0.62) are close behind — both driven by irrational rotations. White noise scores 0.49 (close to the theoretical expectation for uniform random root assignment). Logistic period-2 scores exactly 0.0: alternating between two values creates a degenerate root pattern with no triality.

diversity_ratio

What fraction of the 24 roots are actually used? Solar wind, speech, and PRNG outputs reach 0.50 (12 of 24 roots). Logistic period-4 uses just 1 root (0.04). High diversity means the data explores the full D4 geometry; low diversity means the dynamics are confined to a low-dimensional subspace of the root system.

normalized_entropy

Shannon entropy of the root usage distribution, normalized by the maximum. Nikkei returns (0.64) and DNA (0.64) have the most uniform root distributions — their 4-byte structure genuinely samples the full D4 polytope. Periodic orbits score 0.0 (all weight on one root).

alignment_mean

How well do the 4-byte windows align with the nearest root? Langton's Ant (1.90) and circle map (1.89) produce windows that sit almost exactly on a root direction. Constants score 0.0 — degenerate windows that don't align with any root. This measures how "crystalline" the data's 4-byte structure is in D4 coordinates.

Atlas Rankings

alignment_mean
SourceDomainValue
Langton's Antexotic1.9013
Circle Map Quasiperiodicchaos1.8930
Phyllotaxisbio1.8930
···
Constant 0xFFnoise0.0000
Constant 0x00noise0.0000
Morse Codewaveform0.0000
diversity_ratio
SourceDomainValue
Solar Wind IMFastro0.5000
Solar Wind Speedastro0.5000
Speech "Five"speech0.5000
···
Constant 0xFFnoise0.0000
Constant 0x00noise0.0000
Logistic r=3.5 (Period-4)chaos0.0417
normalized_entropy
SourceDomainValue
Nikkei Returnsfinancial0.6386
DNA Thermusbio0.6375
DNA Phage Lambdabio0.6261
···
Constant 0xFFnoise0.0000
Constant 0x00noise0.0000
Logistic r=3.5 (Period-4)chaos0.0000
triality_invariance
SourceDomainValue
Critical Circle Mapchaos0.6339
Circle Map Quasiperiodicchaos0.6179
Phyllotaxisbio0.6178
···
Constant 0xFFnoise0.0000
Constant 0x00noise0.0000
Logistic r=3.2 (Period-2)chaos0.0000

When It Lights Up

D4 triality is encoding-invariant: the root projection depends on the relative order of the 4 bytes, not their absolute values. Its distinctive contribution to the ordinal view is detecting 4-byte rotational symmetry that the other ordinal geometries (which operate on pairs or 5-grams) miss. The critical circle map / quasiperiodic cluster at the top of the triality ranking connects to the golden ratio: irrational rotations produce 4-byte patterns that are maximally balanced across the triality orbits. This is a structural echo of the fact that D4 triality and quasicrystalline order are both connected to the exceptional algebra structure of Spin(8).

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