ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Time-evolving block decimation

Okay, imagine you have a REALLY big puzzle with lots and lots of pieces. This puzzle is so big that you can't fit it all on your table at once, so you have to take it apart into smaller pieces that you can work on one at a time.

Now, let's say you want to figure out how the puzzle changes over time. Maybe you want to see how it looks after 10 minutes, or after an hour, or after a whole day. But you don't want to have to take apart the puzzle and put it back together again every time you want to check how it's changing. That would be way too much work!

So instead, you use something called "time-evolving block decimation" to help you keep track of the changes. Basically, what this means is that you break the puzzle down into smaller and smaller pieces, and then you track how each of those pieces changes over time.

For example, let's say you start by dividing the puzzle into four equal parts. You work on one of those parts for a while, and then you switch to another one, and so on. As you work on each piece, you keep track of how it changes over time, like whether any new pieces fit into it or whether any pieces need to be taken out.

Then, after a certain amount of time has passed, you take those four pieces and divide them into even smaller pieces. Maybe you divide each one into four smaller pieces, for a total of 16 pieces. Then you work on each of those 16 pieces for a while, keeping track of how they change over time.

You keep doing this over and over again, dividing the puzzle into smaller and smaller pieces and tracking how each piece changes over time. By doing this, you can get a really good idea of how the whole puzzle is changing over time, without having to take it apart and put it back together every time you want to check.

Does that make sense? Time-evolving block decimation is like breaking a big puzzle into smaller and smaller pieces and tracking how each piece changes over time, so you can see how the whole puzzle changes without having to take it apart every time.