Years ago when I was working with Richard Fisher on The Long View, we were trying to come up with a good extended metaphor for lock-in. I was pretty stuck on the idea of a tilt-maze (which is intuitive but unfortunately the term means little to people reading).
The problem with the tilt maze is that it is binary—you are either totally free to move the ball wherever, or you are trapped in a hole. Your diagram works much better—it intuitively gives you the idea of more and less sticky troughs. You could also represent a more binary lock in with a deeper valley.
Love this as a lock-in diagram.
Years ago when I was working with Richard Fisher on The Long View, we were trying to come up with a good extended metaphor for lock-in. I was pretty stuck on the idea of a tilt-maze (which is intuitive but unfortunately the term means little to people reading).
The problem with the tilt maze is that it is binary—you are either totally free to move the ball wherever, or you are trapped in a hole. Your diagram works much better—it intuitively gives you the idea of more and less sticky troughs. You could also represent a more binary lock in with a deeper valley.