Ulysses: a first reading, and the apparatus built around it

The Constraint Model

Dimension 13 · Type V, Model (a constructed system you operate) · Build status: built · Panel score: not yet scored

Routed through the game-design lenses per the working document; adversarially verified twice before publication. Built to every register it budgets: HTML, its document PDF (19 July 2026), and the constraint graph (25 July 2026), drawn from the model's own NODES and EDGES with sourced and assumed edges drawn apart. The PDF states in its own voice that a printed document cannot be operated: it is the model's record, not its substitute. Corrected 25 July 2026: this note said the graph was the one register that remained for the whole of the day after the graph shipped, and the status field said building alongside it (anchor A4 — the correction is shown, not swapped in).

The claim
Operated as a routing-and-avoidance problem, the day's shape is structural rather than arranged. Bloom's constraints are mostly about where he must not be; Stephen's single missing key compounds hour by hour; and the near-misses need no novelist to arrange them.
The unit
the constraint — a graph of eighteen places from the itinerary, a clock running from eight, two purses in pre-decimal coin, and the obligations of two men
What it shows
Run the day yourself and nearly every Bloom decision is a decision not to be somewhere; run a thousand random days through the same graph and they cross the documented track again and again — the book's most-praised coincidences sit inside the expected range of two men with overlapping errands in a small city. A toy model in the economist's sense: it claims nothing about what anyone felt or intended, and says so in its own voice.

The artifact

Registers

The rule that built it

The inclusion rule
"The data, from 03 and only 03"; "Anything not covered by these sixteen lines comes from 03, and the line that uses it says which section"; "Edges exist only where 03 describes a traversal" — every entry tagged [03] or [assumed]. Stated in artifacts/constraint-model/model.html (edges rule; "The data, from 03 and only 03" and per-entry provenance).
What was rejected under it
None kept as a section. The nearest records are exclusions embedded in the printed assumptions: 03's one money glimpse of Bloom ("eightpence," Grafton Street, §8) "is looser and is not modelled" (model.html); Stephen's 15:00-22:00 gap — "nothing is counted" — and the Wandering Rocks fragment "likewise uncounted", both stated as conservative choices (same file). Sources field: "Base document 03... is the sole data source" (data/dimensions.json).
What kind of thing it claims
A MODEL, its assumptions printed — under joint session 09's discriminating test (an inventory can only be attacked at its inclusion rule; a reading at its claim): The record declares its assumptions in its own voice: "A toy model in the economist's sense: it claims nothing about what anyone felt or intended, and says so in its own voice" (data/dimensions.json); "All sixteen modelling assumptions are listed inside the artifact, marked where they apply" (same file); and the artifact prints them in document flow, closing with "Constraints here are hard and exterior; the novel's are soft and interior. That gap is the definition of a toy" (model.html).

In the reading

Sources

Confidence

A toy model: constraints here are hard and exterior where the novel's are soft and interior — the gap is the definition of a toy, shown rather than hidden. Where 03 states no distance or time, the interpolation is marked [assumed] on the line that uses it.

All dimensions · by episode · the working document