A multiway system is a kind of substitution system in which multiple states are permitted at any stage. This accommodates rule systems in which there is more than one possible way to perform an update.
A simple example is a string substitution system. For instance, take the rules and the initial condition . There are two choices for how to proceed. Applying the first rule yields the evolution , while applying the second rule yields the evolution . So at the first step, there is a single state (), at the second step there are two states , and at the third step there is a single state .
A path through a multiway system arising from a choice of which substitutions to make is called an evolution. Typically, a multiway system will have a large number of possible evolutions. For example, consider strings of s and s with the rule . Then most strings will have more than one occurrence of the substring , and each occurrence leads down another path in the multiway system.