State: Processing. An unexpected event arrives — not an error, just unlikely . The guard condition frays. The machine forks. Two regions of the orthogonal HSM wake simultaneously. They send signals across the boundary without a handshake. A transition is taken before the exit action completes.
– none. The HSMMaelstrom does not crash. It recursively deepens. Every attempted reset initializes a new layer beneath the current chaos, leaving the old one to rotate forever as a shadow state. HSMMaelstrom
The HSMMaelstrom begins where all clean hierarchies end: at the edge of a state that refuses to settle. State: Processing
State: Conflict. The history state remembers a path that no longer exists. A deep child broadcasts an event upward, but the parent is already mid-transition. The event queues overflow. Priorities invert. A pseudostate meant for choice becomes a sink. The run-to-completion step never finishes — because the step itself spawns new steps. The machine forks
Recursive Gyre
State: Runaway. All hierarchical containment fails. A state in one region calls changeState on a sibling region, which triggers an ancestor’s entry action, which spawns a temporary orthogonal region, which immediately receives a deferred event from three cycles ago. The stack of active state configurations becomes a tangled tree. Depth-first search for the current state loops.