8.2 Decision bases and excluded alternatives (TPS 0.1.0)
Instruction artifact, machine-optimized text: TPS 0.1.0, section 8.2 Decision bases and excluded alternatives. Part of TPS 0.1.0 and the TPM hub. Human-only edit (TPS 5.13). Version 0.1.0, proposed, revision 4; declaration pending. The text below is this section of the TPS 0.1.0 artifact, verbatim; the whole artifact and its file digest are on The Principia Machina/TPS. Human readers: the contents page is the map.
TPS 8.2 DECISION BASES AND EXCLUDED ALTERNATIVES
purpose: for each decision the basis and the alternatives excluded,
with the measure that excluded them
governs: 8.2 | version: 0.1.0 (proposed) | class: instruction artifact
audience: operator
BASIS 8.2.0 Every decision below was ranked on the measures of 1.4;
"soundness" and "completeness" name the defect kind that decided
the exclusion, and "R2" and "R3" name the measure. The full text
of each item is in the record's section 3. [I-010]
BASIS D1 RECORD IDENTIFIER AND LAYER NAME, resolved D1.1. Per-container
identifier space; RR-1..RR-855 import unchanged; a cross-container
citation carries the prefix by construction. [B-01]
BASIS D2 MAP TYPE IN THE TRANSLATION MANIFOLD, D2.1. Isomorphism only;
the restriction is priced in the TPK, not the entry. Excluded: a
RESTRICTION object relating two containers, by the sealing of
containers. [B-02]
BASIS D3 THE WORD "DOMAIN", D3.1. DOMAIN keeps the guide's meaning.
Basis: both BFP historical errors were domain elisions at
promotion (guide C5), so the field and its anchor to that failure
history are kept. [B-03]
BASIS D4 TWO RANKING RULES. Settled by the ranking rule; amended by
D15: machinery ranked by the measures of 1.4, physics by each
container's TMS. [I-010]
BASIS D5 TPK IMMUTABILITY WITH COPY-FORWARD, D5.2 and reopen. Fixed by
constraint: the TPK is immutable. Excluded: copy with tags intact
and citable at once (soundness); inherited records keeping
predecessor identifiers (soundness; one identifier, two records;
collides with D1); digest verified at CAC only (soundness; writes
accepted against a modified TPK between audits). [B-04]
BASIS D6 TFK SCOPE AND DIGEST STRUCTURE, D6.1, amended D15. Basis of
the third zone: a yardstick-only successor stays distinguishable
from a physics-changed one; placing the TMS inside the TPK would
have omitted that case (completeness). [B-05] [B-13]
BASIS D7 THE TERM FOR THE IMMUTABLE FOUNDATION, D7.1, amended D17.
STATIC rejected (collides with statics). FIXED rejected (collides
with "held fixed", with "fixed field", and with ordinary use).
"Immutable unit" retired by D17 in favor of TFK. [B-06]
BASIS D8 ESCALATION REACHABILITY, D8.2 plus constraint. A local
working instance; a session works locally and pushes when the
wiki is reachable; page identity by title plus content hash,
applied without pause. [B-07]
BASIS D9 MANIFEST CONSTRUCTION, D9.1, amended D21, D32. Excluded: a
hand-transcribed digest is not a digest. [B-08]
BASIS D10 REFRESH TRIGGER, D10.1 and .2, amended D19, D32. The daily
push withdrawn; landing on demand through TPX. [I-052] [I-120]
BASIS D11 INDEX SCOPE, D11.1 plus addition. One index, all classes; a
library page per container and a central hub with one entry point
per audience. [B-09]
BASIS D12 RETIRED CONTAINERS, D12.1. The index grows monotonically.
[B-10]
BASIS D13 LANDING, D13.2, reopened twice, D13.1 twice, amended D18. The
block ID as fencing token; expiry definitional; recommission with
a back-pointer; the corroboration record. [B-11]
BASIS D14 WORKSPACE MUTEX, D14.1, amended D18, D19, D32. Excluded: lock
plus timeout without fencing; a stalled lead's late push
overwrites a successor's work (soundness). Amended: a client-side
check is no longer a check anywhere in TPM. [B-12]
BASIS D15 STRIKE CRITERIA: SITE AND STRUCTURE, D15.1 plus A1-A3, S6 by
S6.1. Reopened on the constraint that the strike rule be generic
across TPM, mathematically precise, grounded in Popper, and
researched against the literature. Excluded: an overridable
default TMS template (a container could relax (i); soundness);
closing on the round-1 proposal alone (foreclosed by the generic
constraint). [B-13]
BASIS D16 STRIKE RULE CONTENT, D16.1, after a research round (8.3 group
H). Basis by source: SR1-SR2 Popper sect. 3, 6; SR3 GUM; SR4
parameter counting (Popper sect. 38, 43; Akaike; Schwarz; Forster
and Sober), depth admitted only under a declared convention (Cook
and Reckhow), Kolmogorov complexity excluded as uncomputable (Li
and Vitanyi); SR5 Duhem-Quine underdetermination resolved by
distance; SR6 Popper sect. 22 reproducibility, Laplace-Hume
proportionality through a container raising N_x; SR7 the
declaration that mathematics and logic are the gold standard; SR8
PDG and CODATA practice against the record of underestimated
uncertainties (Henrion and Fischhoff; Youden; Feynman), Lyons as
why k is declared per container. Structural result: distance and
contradiction count are incommensurable, and every established
parsimony measure is a count or a code length, never a weighted
blend. The golden ratio as a candidate weight has no principled
basis in the literature (REFUTED, S47) and survives only as a
declarable convention. Excluded: derivation depth as the primary
measure (soundness); automatic reversal on reaching N_x in the L
regime (soundness); Kolmogorov or MDL distance now (uncomputable,
or requires an undeclared formal language; MDL admissible later
as a local yardstick under A1); a scalar weight of distance
against count, golden ratio included. [B-14]
BASIS D17 NAMES FOR THE THREE ZONES AND THE FULL KERNEL, D17.1
augmented. TPK for MTX; TMS for MEASURE SET; TFK for "immutable
unit". Withdrawn: The Formalism Kernel; The Verification Tensor
(collides with a physics term of art); Result Grading Unit
(would imply ownership of the GRADE field); The Conceptual Kernel
(would give "conceptual" a second meaning). [B-15]
BASIS D18 COLLABORATION PAGE FORM, D18.1. Basis: silence-expiry lands
nothing wrong, and a heartbeat adds no safety, only a channel that
can mislead (S17, S18). Two defects found and fixed: expiry made
definitional; the acquisition window bounds a dead queue head.
Excluded: petitioner heartbeat (no safety gain); WORKLOAD and ETA
copied into the assignment row (two copies of ETA; completeness);
expiry by marking only (soundness). [B-16]
BASIS D19 STALENESS RULE, D19.1, amended D23, D32. Basis: staleness
attaches only while a lock is held; "always stale" would leave no
realizable CURRENT state (completeness); release-after-push closes
the case of unpushed work; the badge written last lets a reader
detect a torn read (soundness); the three states map onto the
three citation levels exactly. Excluded: a minimal badge of holder
and last push (a mid-push read accepted as current; soundness);
HOLDER SILENT folded into STALE (completeness). [B-17]
BASIS D20 CHECK-CLASS MATRIX, D20.1, amended D32. A third class for
platform-enforced checks was not selected: the enforcement column
carries the distinction. [B-18]
BASIS D21 PERMISSIONS TABLE, D21.1, amended D26, D32. Resolves the
two-owner defect of the round-1 chain page: the chain is two
pages. Excluded: one chain page, agent-appendable, carrying
declarations (unsound without a verified edit filter); a
human-only chain page fed by hand-copied build lines; agents
drafting help pages directly to the live sets. [B-19]
BASIS D22 AI CERTIFICATION, D22.1, after a research round (8.3 group
I). At the time 27 of 32 checks rested on the agent; with TPX,
seven still do, plus the untrusted-input rules. No standard
certifies a deployed agent's behavior; every evaluator disclaims
guarantees; tests saturate and leak; behavior drifts behind a
model name; injection is unsolved at the model level. Excluded:
certification as a guarantee or as the sole gate (soundness);
public benchmarks as the suite; certification bound to a model
alias; no certification (completeness). [B-20]
BASIS D23 INSTRUCTION SET DIGEST, D23.1; amended by D37.1. Warrant:
version currency and honest drift only; the digest is
self-reported and the artifacts are public. Excluded: reading a
match as evidence of self-constraint (soundness); a digest
computed by hand; a challenge-response proof of possession;
PMP-TPM and its named skills only, presented at petition only
(completeness). [B-21]
BASIS D24 VALIDATION OF PMP-TPM 0.1.0. OPERATIONAL; outcome carried
VERIFY; an implementation matter, not a TPS item. [B-22]
BASIS D25 NEW-CONTAINER PAGE, D25.1. Full CAC gate, declaration before
initialization. Excluded: initialization before declaration in a
PENDING state (a container never declared holds a UUID and prefix
with no expiry or retirement path; completeness); a TMS-only gate
with TPK and TrM checked later (soundness); a hand-assigned UUID
or prefix. [B-23]
BASIS D26 TFK AUTHORING SURFACE BEFORE INSTANTIATION, D26.1. Excluded:
reuse of the staging subpage class (keyed by container, and none
exists yet; completeness); H-DECL hand-transcribing
agent-proposed TFK content (worst R2). [B-23]
BASIS D27 TBD 1 CLOSURE, D27.1. The register's creation after the UUID
leaves the collision nothing to stand on. Excluded: keeping TBD 1
open (one further round; R3). [B-23]
BASIS D28 UUID GENERATION RESOURCE, D28.1. GlobalIdGenerator v4 under
RFC 9562. Excluded: version 1 (embeds node identity; privacy);
version 7 (index locality unused by page titles; pins the
runtime); the host runtime's generator (tied on all three, not
selected because the back end is in-wiki); the deprecated
UIDGenerator. [B-23]
BASIS D29 FORM MECHANISM FOR THE NEW-CONTAINER PAGE, D29.1; extended by
D32. Refusing a failed component before save is possible only
inside MediaWiki. Excluded: Page Forms with an external back end
invoking the CAC after save (refusal post-save; a second
field-check vocabulary; completeness; a third-party dependency);
no form layer (worst R2); plain wikitext TFK pages parsed
heuristically (soundness). [B-23] [B-24]
BASIS D30, D31 WITHDRAWN. The upload decoder and its name; the numbers
are reserved and not reused; replaced by the local-AI path
(5.5.7). [B-25]
BASIS D32 PLACEMENT OF DETERMINISTIC RESPONSIBILITY, D32.1. Limits
recorded: PHP work lives inside a web request; no daemons and no
cross-page transactions; deferred updates hide failure and are
barred from critical writes; external binaries run only under
the shell framework's limits or Shellbox. Excluded: the lock in a
TPX table (lock transitions leave page history unless separately
logged; completeness); the earlier split with fencing, manifest,
badge and canaries in external scripts (a client-side fencing
check lets the wiki accept a stale push from a non-compliant
client; soundness under CR2). [B-26]
BASIS D33 NAMES OF THE THREE PARTS, D33.1. Excluded: the extension as a
sixth layer (the five-layer count recurs; completeness). [B-26]
BASIS 8.2.1 The collaboration mechanics were first stated as user
requirements (a mutex; the holder as LEAD; coworker takeover on
release; return of the mutex when idle before maintenance; a
24-hour bound); D14, D18 and D19 fixed the mechanics, and D32
withdrew the daily push. [B-34]
BASIS 8.2.2 The strike criteria were first stated as requirements:
grounded in Popper; an immutable object cannot be contradicted by
the container's own research objects; between inconsistent
objects the advantage goes to the one closest to the immutables,
by steps of computation or by added assumptions; an extraordinary
case is needed for a more distant object to prevail; the
weighting to be objective and researched; mathematical precision
and logical consistency the gold standard, error bars for
measured results. D15 and D16 fixed the rule. [B-37]
BASIS D39.1 TrM SKELETON. The TMS had a skeleton, per-container
parameters and compliance tests; the TrM had none of the three.
STRUCTURE-PRESERVING has no meaning until the structure is
named; an isomorphism needs two declared objects and only the
DOF inventory was declared; INJECTIVE needs sameness on the
target side. Excluded: a contract held outside D(TrM), since
meaning could then change without moving D(TFK); a per-entry
EXCLUSIONS field, which contradicts D2.1. Not selected: leaving
the question to the guide, which leaves the H-DECL gates judging
against an undeclared criterion; a per-entry contract, which
gives structure spanning entries no site.
BASIS D40.1 "ONE QUANTITY". SR8 scaled "standing M records of one
quantity" and SR3 subtracted one value from another, with
nothing saying when two records are of one quantity or share a
unit and convention. That identity can come only from the TrM.
Not selected: routing it to the register piece with no rule now;
sameness judged by inspection at each test, which supplies no
criterion.
BASIS D41.2 STRIKE RULE HARDENING. SR4 counted distinct ASSUMPTIONS
with no identity rule: bundling lowered a(r), and one assumption
in two wordings made two contradictions look independent and
corrupted the SR5 locus. SR6 bounds the damage because reaching
N_x opens an audit and never strikes. Not selected: the full
fix, a closure-based s(r) with an SR9 test for rank invariance
under split, merge, cite-versus-inline and relabel; the corpus
alone. Excluded: identical ranking under every semantically
equivalent representation, not attainable by a computable count,
on the basis that excluded Kolmogorov and MDL distance at D16.
BASIS D42.1 with D44.1 CORROBORATION INDEPENDENCE. "Independent second
agent" meant only a second account, and the only corroboration
path was accidental: a refused result for the same work block,
with the applicant judging its own match. Not selected: the
attested vector as display only; an eight-dimension vector
filled by the agent, five of whose fields nothing can verify.
BASIS D43.1 with D47.1 TPC AND BUILD ORDER. A second implementation in
another language catches what PHP-common behavior hides, such as
serialization defaults and float-to-string conversion, and
serialization drift is the named failure of hash chains; PRB
owed agent-side digests anyway. "Calculator" because "core" sits
on kernel in meaning and MediaWiki core is standing usage, and
because a reference implementation conventionally wins a
disagreement while this one has no authority. Excluded: TPX
invoking Python on the host, which contradicts the placement
rule and depends on shell execution a shared host may not grant;
a distributed binary, which has no verifiable correspondence to
its source. Not selected: PHP alone; a narrow non-PHP
cross-check; an unpublished oracle; the strict sequence that
freezes TPS and builds TPX last, whose recovery steps have no
substrate before TPX exists.
BASIS D46.1 This revision lands in the same page tree because the
genesis line is not yet landed; once it is, the next change is a
new version (see 0.1.3, 5.11.2).
BASIS D48 CA-GTP AND THE WORK PIPELINE, D48. Basis: complete mediation
- a mediator that cannot be bypassed is the only checking
resource a non-compliant client cannot defeat, which is 5.1's
placement argument applied to the register rather than the push.
Excluded: a CA-GTP initializing as lead by default (contradicts
the collaboration mechanics of 5.7 and 5.8; completeness); the
agent writing the register with TPX auditing afterwards (a
client-side check is no check; soundness); naming the certified
agent GTP (conflates the instruction set with the party).
BASIS D49 CANARY DELIVERY BY SPIKED READ, D49. Basis: a decoy is
effective in proportion to its believability, and is
differentiable to the defender only. Excluded: planting probes
as page content on staging and return pages (every plant is a
revision, so the history is a published list of canaries;
soundness); announcing a probe rate per account (turns
continuous certification back into a test window, which CR2's
sources find agents detect).
BASIS D50 CANARY GENERATION, D50. Basis: moving target defense -
randomizing the configuration is half the defense and
randomizing the reconfiguration interval the other half, a fixed
period being itself a fingerprint; a randomization space
including weak configurations is worse than a fixed strong one;
maximum entropy on a bounded interval; distance-weighted
importance sampling; BM25 as the distance; known-fault injection
as the way to verify a checker. Excluded: an off-site model
shaping probes (content leaves the wiki; excluded by 1.3 and
6.2); a local model shaping them (admissible and not defective,
but it adds a generative distribution to fingerprint, enlarges
what must be trusted, and makes provenance unauditable);
single-UWC sampling (smaller corpus, easier to model); a fixed
theta (converges to an estimable constant); a fixed rotation
period (synchronizable).
BASIS D51 THE SCORECARD, D51. Basis: continuous monitoring requires
automated collection, a defined cadence, a defined recipient
role and an actionable output; a monitoring record is forwarded
off the host that generates it; alert fatigue under a low base
rate; the zero-failure confidence bound; the sequential test.
Excluded: failure detail sent in full on the alert channel (one
message discloses a probe of the suite; soundness); failure
detail published (the same disclosure, permanently); failure
detail held only off-wiki (outside the system of record;
completeness); a full report every period regardless (trains the
reader to skim); no heartbeat in quiet periods (a silent channel
and a broken one are indistinguishable).
BASIS D52 UWC ACCESS POLICY, D52. Basis: the access matrix; role-based
access control with a per-object list; least privilege, complete
mediation and economy of mechanism, the last being why the
CLOSED predicate is stated once. Excluded: a disjunctive rule,
list or group (a list could authorize an uncertified agent;
soundness); the declaring authority owning every access list (no
security gain under the conjunctive rule; worst error
opportunity); the policy immutable at instantiation (forces a
copy-forward for a team change, which changes the UUID and
prefix for no correctness reason); gating read as well as write
(breaks 1.3 and makes 5.17's corpus a covert channel).
BASIS D53 CERTIFICATION AS A CANDIDATE CERTIFICATE, D53. Basis:
certification rules require human judgment and are not
mechanizable; enforcement rules are executed by the system. 5.6
was already an instance of that split. Excluded: TPX making the
admission decision (contradicts CR1, CR4, CR5 and CR6;
soundness); leaving suite execution and scoring with the human
(worst error opportunity, and a hand-scored probe is the
hand-transcribed digest in another form).
BASIS D54 THE VERSION-AGNOSTIC TREE, D54. Basis: generalizes D46.1
from one revision to a standing rule. Excluded: a version in the
page title (every revision spawns a tree, every cross-reference
rewrites, and a reader cannot tell a current page from a
superseded one by its title).
BASIS D55 HISTORY-PRESERVING MIGRATION, D55. Basis: the platform's own
move form states that a rename moves all of a page's history to
the new title and leaves a redirect, so renaming preserves
history and the operation that loses it is a delete followed by a
reimport, whose deleted revisions reach the archive table and
return only by a manual administrator undelete. The stronger
ground for 7.2.8 follows: a version-free title makes the page's
revision history the version history, so the platform's own
mechanism is used rather than duplicated. Excluded: delete and
reimport, the order first written (destroys live history; worst
recoverability, and the blast radius is every revision of 47
pages); a cut-and-paste move (the same defect plus loss of
attribution, and the platform tags it); keeping versioned titles
and accepting fragmented history (contradicts the requirement
and leaves the duplicate version-management system in place).
BASIS D56 FAILURE-DETAIL READ RESTRICTION, D56. Basis: the platform's
protection types are create, edit, move and upload, and
namespace protection governs edit, so no native protection
restricts read; the platform's own documentation on preventing
access warns that per-page read restriction is not reliable,
which is why each read path is enumerated and tested rather than
assumed. Not selected: the detail as rows of an append-only TPX
table with no page, only its digest on the wiki; the detail held
off-wiki (outside the system of record, 1.3).
BASIS D57 THE REFERENCES ENTRY FORM, D57. Basis: the references page
shows citation and application only, so a Limit line changes
nothing a reader sees. Not selected: Limit required, the build
refusing until 60 missing lines were written (60 authoring
operations for no change to the page).