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Explore project states and possible traps

A fictional steel mill can change vendor, automate, suffer industrial action or face a market shock. Draw the possible moves, then ask: which situations can it leave, and where might a chosen walk spend its time?

Try this · model · limits · sources

Try. Run 250 steps. The two exits from Baseline Ops have weights 0.35 and 0.15, so the model chooses them with chances 70% and 30%. Raise the cutoff to 0.30: Automation loses its 0.10 route to Market Shock. Raise it to 0.31: Automation has no active exit and the walk stays there. Undo an edit or perturbation to compare.

Model. Nodes are situations, not tasks. Viability is your assumed score from 0 to 1. Positive outgoing weights that meet the cutoff are normalised for each move. Closed classes are strongly connected groups without an active exit; single states with no exit are included. These are properties of the supplied graph.

Result. Dashed outlines show closed classes; thicker outlines and links show visit counts. The table provides the same information and editing controls. A closed class can contain high or low scores; being visited often does not prove resilience. A cutoff changes the model used by both analysis and walks.

Limits. Invented weights and scores are not calibrated probabilities, safety assessments or forecasts. A model perturbation is reversible here; it does not establish that an intervention would be safe in a project. There is no viability kernel, control policy, causal validation, resource or schedule model. With impacts enabled, visits change the destination's score, but do not change transition weights.

Basis. Grinstead & Snell, Introduction to Probability, chapter 11 defines transition probabilities and absorbing states. NetworkX's attracting-components reference describes closed strongly connected components. These sources support the mathematics, not the fictional assumptions. Earlier example · Retention and validation notes.

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The state graph

Select or drag a node; use Enter on a focused node/edge to edit. Arrow keys move a focused node. Drag background to pan. The complete lists below also work without the graph.

● At/above threshold● Intermediate band● Low band · blue outline: start · dashed: closed class · thickness: visit count

What the model implies

Closed classes

    A closed class has no active route out. Only classes reachable from the selected start can be entered from there. “Attention score” below is the explicit heuristic (active in-degree + out-degree + 1) × (1 − viability); it is not a risk estimate.

    States: inspect, compare and edit

    All states, including unreachable states
    StateScore / bandReachableClosed classVisitsAttention score

    Transitions: assumed weights and effective chances

    Every transition; chances normalised among active exits from the same source
    TransitionWeightActive?Model chanceImpactTraversals