I would challenge the utility of this mental model as again they're not simply tracing a "most likely" path unless your sampling methods are trivially greedy. I don't know of a better way to model it, and I promise I'm not trying to be anal here
Agreed - I picked certain words to be intentionally ambiguous eg “most likely” since it provides an effective intuitive grasp of what’s going on, even if it’s more complicated than that.
