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So many better terms could have been used ;

Adjacency, Velocity, Adhesion, etc

But! if temp denotes a graphing in a non-linear function (heat map) then it also implies topological, because temperature is affected by adjacency - where a topological/toroidal graph is more indicative of the selection set?



The term temperature is used because they are literally using Boltzmann's distribution from statistical mechanics: e^(-H/T) where H is energy (Hamiltonian), T is temperature.

The probability they give to something of score H is just like in statistical mechanics, e^(-H/T) and they divide by the partition function (sum) similarly to normalize. (You might recognize it with beta=1/T there)


Temperature here is used in the sense of statistical physics: a parameter that affects the probability of each microstate.


Right, it’s not termed to be understood from the user perspective, a common trait in naming. It increases the jumble within the pool of next possible word choices, as heat increases Brownian motion. That’s the way I think of it, at least.




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