This is a real 2D causal dynamical triangulation (CDT): spacetime is not assumed smooth — it is built by gluing flat triangles between successive spatial slices, exactly as in Ambjørn & Loll's original 1998 lattice construction. Each spatial slice t is a discrete circle of nt vertices; consecutive slices are stitched together with nt + nt+1 triangles (an "up" triangle uses 2 vertices from the lower slice + 1 from the upper, a "down" triangle the reverse), so the whole structure is a genuine simplicial manifold with a well-defined causal (foliated) time direction — no acausal wormholes or baby universes are allowed to form, which is exactly the rule that separates CDT from ordinary (non-causal) dynamical triangulation.
n(t) = n_base · [0.15 + 0.85·cos(π(t/(T-1) − 0.5))] + noise(κ)
The mean shape above is not decorative: full CDT Monte Carlo simulations of the gravitational path integral find that, after summing over triangulations, the expected spatial volume profile ⟨V(t)⟩ traces out exactly this "cigar" / cos-like curve — a genuinely quantum spacetime spontaneously organizing into a de Sitter-like universe. The κ slider adds a random walk on top of that mean shape, representing the volume fluctuations the path integral sums over.
Spectral dimension probe: "Measure" launches many independent random walkers from a random vertex across the triangulation's edge graph and records the return probability P(σ) after σ hops. The spectral dimension is extracted from two probe scales σ₁ < σ₂ via:
d_s = −2 · [ln P(σ₂) − ln P(σ₁)] / [ln σ₂ − ln σ₁]
For an ordinary flat 2D lattice this returns ds ≈ 2, matching the analytic result proven for 2D CDT — this simulator lets you watch that number emerge numerically from a finite, noisy triangulation instead of taking it on faith. The bright hopping marker on the canvas is one live sample walker from the last measurement.