Lazy instantiation.
As an analogy, consider Hashlife [1]. It works very differently than your typical game of life implementation... but it still agrees on all the intermediate states! The board won't behave normally for most implementations, but end up in states spelling out "we know we're being cached hierarchically!" when you simulate with hashlife.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8638150
Lazy loading makes perfect sense to me!