It's a neat encoding but the writeup is needlessly confusing. The introduction would really benefit from a graph or two. Or even just a textual sequence showing

It's a neat encoding but the writeup is needlessly confusing. The introduction would really benefit from a graph or two. Or even just a textual sequence showing how the value evolves as you iterate on it. Similarly, while the end result is quite elegant the consequences of the choices made to get there aren't really explained. It's quite a bit of extra effort to reason out what would have happened if things had been done differently.