Not only that, but “wavefunction collapse” makes it sound a lot more complex and makes it more daunting to understand. A simple description of the simple tiled model algorithm in the article is basically “pick a candidate at random and prune remaining lists to remove now-invalid candidates” or something similar. Building the rules is simply “list all of the pairs in the example and store how frequently they occur. The frequency count prioritises more common pairs and pairs not encountered in the example can’t occur in the output”. No “quantum” or “wavefunction” or anything here. A list of candidate items isn’t a wavefunciton.

When I first saw this technique, I was interested in replicating it. So I started reading about wavefunction collapse on wikipedia. It had a bunch of complex quantum math and I gave up thiniking the technique was beyond me. But now I see it was also completely irrelevant. Thanks to the bad name, I gave up on it (until now, at least, when I see that its a lot simpler).