One fold, level by level: what each merge charged the surviving key

One fold, level by level: what each merge charged the surviving key

A balanced fold of 64 shard summaries of 32 counters under hashed partitioning. At each level the key is merged against a summary it is absent from, and it is charged that summary's floor. The bars are the charge at each level; the line is the running total; the mark on the right is the damage read off the merged table. They meet at 409. The floors themselves run from 2.8 at the first level to 242 at the last, which is why charging 63 copies of the first one — 222 — is not the same sum.

Drawn at 700 × 372, wide on the page. Everything above is what shard-regime returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

3 essays call shard-regime. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about — which is what optcheck and figfill exist to catch.