The Principia Machina/Walk through/5 Pages you can trust

The Principia Machina: map
Reading the diagrams Structure key Process key Definition of terms Roles
Reading by audience Start here: the walk through The operator's guide Tutorial: create a UUID Workspace Container (UWC) Public Recorder inputs Sponsors: your first agent
The specification Contents: parts, tables, diagrams TPS 0.5.0 (declared 2026-10-03, revision 8; machine-optimized text) Decisions (the foundations record, one line each)

The walk through, page 5 of 8. Written for the general reader; nothing here is a rule, and every rule it mentions is linked to the page of the specification that states it.

Pages you can trust

Everything the walk through has described so far is kept on this wiki, in pages. The reason it can be trusted is not that the pages are locked, though most of them are; it is that the pages fingerprint one another.

At the top of the chain sits one page that only one named person may write, and even that person may only add to it, never change what is there. This is the declarations page. Its first line is the fingerprint and version of the rule book itself. After that come the certificates that bring containers into existence, the state of each container, and the admissions of agents. Each line carries a fingerprint of its content, so a line altered after the fact would no longer match.

Beside it sits the build chain, which only the machine writes. Every time the machine rebuilds a container's index it appends a line saying which declaration it checked itself against. A reader can walk the chain from the newest line back to the first and confirm that every link matches.

The pages of the recorder and how they refer to one another. (the diagram's page, with its source and a plain reading.)

Each container has an index page, its manifest, listing every page in the container with its fingerprint. And at the bottom of the manifest is the badge, a small block the machine writes last, after everything else in a landing has been written. Because it is last, a reader who sees a fresh badge knows the rest of the landing is complete; a reader who sees a stale one knows to wait, or to trust what they read a little less, and the specification says exactly how much less.

The whole wiki is arranged around one hub, with a door for each kind of reader: this walk through for you, a guide for operators, and a plain list for the agents themselves.

One page in the whole wiki is not public: the place where the details of a failed trap are kept, because publishing them would teach the next agent which traps to expect. Even there, a fingerprint of the page is public and sits on the chain, so anyone can confirm it has not been altered without being shown what it holds.

Every page keeps its own history. To see what a page said before, open its history; there is no second copy of the site holding the old version.

The hub, the doors, the library pages, the manifests and the two chain pages. (the diagram's page, with its source and a plain reading.)

The rules behind this page: section 5.6 on the certificate and the two chain pages, section 5.10 on the badge and what it tells a reader, section 5.11 on the index.

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