Guide 6: Audits, strikes and decision items

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 operator's guide. It assumes the walk through; a newcomer should read that first. Each page opens with its diagram, states its purpose and scope, gives the procedure, names what it does not cover, works one example, and links the sections of the specification that govern it. Where this guide and the specification differ, the specification governs.

The path a record takes through SR1 to SR9 when a contradiction appears. (diagram page.)

Purpose

Know what the audit does on its own, what it puts to a person, and what the operator records.

Scope

When the audit runs, what it strikes without asking, when it opens an audit block, how a decision item is put and recorded. Not covered: the physics of any contradiction.

Procedure

The audit runs at certification and at every later run. It checks every record against the register and the master record and applies the strike rule.
It strikes without asking in two cases: a record contradicting the kernel, and the more distant of two contradicting records when their distances differ. Each strike is a WITHDRAWAL record, forward-only, naming what it struck and what stands; it writes the status REFUTED into the struck record and sets its grade REFUTED. In the same act every standing record whose citations or assumptions reach the struck one is withdrawn with it, grade WITHDRAWN, unless the declaring authority's audit decision names it as still standing (TPS 3.3.3, 3.3.14).
It opens an audit block, and never decides one, on equal distance; when the count of independent contradictions reaches the container's threshold; on a difference of kind at a test; on a held record with no eligible reproducer or a mismatched reproduction; when a measured result fails its verification record's test; and, under the audit trigger AUTOMATIC, when a record gathers enough independent, agreeing non-corroborations, or on request (TPS 4.1.6).
Every audit block closes as a decision item put to the human: the colliding authorities, the slots, the blast radius, labeled options in preference order. The human selects; the selection is recorded with the block.
Measured records are scaled before any contradiction test when their scatter exceeds their stated uncertainties; a contradiction that does not survive the scaling is not one. A measured record never strikes a logical derivation; the disagreement becomes a NAMED_GAP record against the derivation's assumptions, or, when it has none, against the kernel's DOMAIN, which only a declaration restricts. The locus of a strike under SR5 is a NAMED_GAP record too (TPS 3.3.5).
Assumptions are records with identifiers. Atomicity and duplication are inspected once, when an assumption record is allocated, not at every audit; after that the distance count, the strike locus and the independence test are arithmetic over identifiers.
A measured pair is comparable only if both name one manifold entry, with equal CONDITIONS - the same initial and boundary values in their assumptions and the same point AT - and only after normalization (TPS 4.4.13); an undeclared difference of convention opens an audit block rather than a guess.

Checklist

Every strike has a withdrawal record listing its cascade; nothing is deleted.
Every audit block has a recorded decision item and selection.
Where an open decision item is written on the wiki is not yet fixed by the specification (docket C-30); record it on the control panel until it is.
The atomicity judgment recorded against the assumption record, with the inspector's account.
Seven adversarial cases run in the suite as a report-only corpus; they gate nothing.

Non-goals

Ranking physics results is the container's Measure Set's job, not the operator's (TPS 4.3).

Worked example

Two standing records give different values for the same quantity. Both are measured. The audit scales their uncertainties by the scatter, finds the difference still exceeds the container's multiplier, and compares distances: one needed two extra assumptions, the other four. The four-assumption record is struck; its two extra assumptions are recorded as the locus, in a NAMED_GAP record, and the records that cite the struck one are withdrawn with it. No person was asked; both records remain readable.

Governing sections: TPS 4.1, TPS 4.4, TPS 4.6, TPS 6.3.

Previous: Landing and post-refusal. Next: Certifying agents.