Glossary

A Synthesist-side unit: the same model with the same dictionary, differing from its siblings only in disposition. Taste, anti-taste, control, physics, and the held candidates are generators. Never called a seat. Owner: docs/GENERATORS-AND-SEATS.md §3.

The collection of generators plus the interface that drives them — cached seeds, per-generator siloed history, the ask/score loop. New term, coined 2026-09-21: the repo had no word for this, which is why "panel" was borrowed from the Differential and why a surface confused the two. The bank is specified, not built, and is gated on the trial (GENERATORS-AND-SEATS.md §6). Owner: docs/GENERATORS-AND-SEATS.md §§4–5.

A Differential unit only. Within the Differential, seat is also the role field on a roster row (Hypothesis, Lateral, Legitimacy, Bound), distinct from the panel member — the persona filling that role. Both senses are Differential-internal and are defined together in the owner. Owner: docs/procedure-differential-tool.md.

The Differential tool, and a run of it; its records are panels/PN-NNN-<case>-<house>.md. Never used for anything Synthesist-side. Owner: differential/README.md. Not a collision: panel.js and the site's "concept panel" are a code-level name for the website's concept detail pane, unrelated to the Differential (docs/AREA-COUPLING.md). It is a filename, not a term of art; left as-is deliberately, and named here so it does not read as one.

The Differential's editable list of panel members (name, seat, stance text, active toggle), persisted in the published artifact's database. Owner: docs/procedure-differential-tool.md. The Synthesist's defining property is having none (docs/SYNTHESIST.md §2) — which is a statement about the instrument inside, not about the bank around it; see §2 there. Not a collision: "the lens roster is twelve" in docs/AREA-COUPLING.md is ordinary English for a count of lenses.

Three Differential-side terms proposed for v5 (2026-09-29, after PN-002). Checker pass: the post-round call that extracts numeric, directional and citation claims from seats and House and checks them against the case and lab report — a processing step, not a seat (the §10.5 gate that cut Kind). Record packet: a generated, read-only, hashed block of facts from scored runs given to a panel beside its case. Seat record: the append-only table of one seat's scored predictions (panels/SEAT-RECORD.md), shown only to that seat. None is a Synthesist term. Owner: docs/v5-plan.md §6 until the build lands; then docs/procedure-differential-tool.md.

What makes one generator differ from another: a manufactured reaching-tendency, produced by stance framing rather than by what the generator is given to know. The chosen word for the Synthesist side. Retired synonym: "stance" on the generator side — it collided with the Differential's roster field. Owner: docs/GENERATORS-AND-SEATS.md §3.

A Differential roster field — the persona's characteristic worldview text, sent as part of its system prompt. This is the only surviving sense. Owner: docs/procedure-differential-tool.md.

Differential side only. Tags on what a panel contributes. Found: a recordable quantity or route the case does not name, which predicts a difference between members of the case. Borrowed: a named theorem or framework whose prediction does not depend on the case. With procedural and void. They are not "reach" or "hole": reaching belongs to the generator's disposition. Owner: docs/v5-plan.md §12.8.

Retired 2026-09-21. It was a third synonym for generator/disposition, defined nowhere. Every use has been replaced by generator (the unit) or disposition (its character). Do not reintroduce.

The two things the charter calls the product: the blind cross-domain generator (the Synthesist) and the computational tester. This is the only sense. Owner: docs/CHARTER.md. Corrected: the Synthesist and the Differential are two tools or two instruments, not "two engines" — the Differential is not an engine in the charter's sense, and the old phrasing put two different pairs under one word. Not a collision: engine.js is a filename.

The resistance between generation and filing: the requirement that an association be stated as a friction with branches — using the rung vocabulary — before it can become a case. The valve is a mechanism, not a person. The codifier operates it; the charter's earlier phrasing ("the human plus the coordinate system") described the operator, not the thing. Owner: docs/GENERATORS-AND-SEATS.md §2. Operation: docs/CODIFIER.md §4.3.

Everything the project files — the registries (cases/, lab/runs/, probes/, audits/, panels/, exemplars/, notes/) and the map tiers in the .js sources (statements.js, lenses.js, domain-math.js, episodes.js, …). "What the map keeps" therefore means "what gets filed anywhere," which is how the phrase has always been used. site/ is the map's rendering, never itself the map — it is generated output and is rebuilt from the sources above (docs/OUTTAKE.md, Generated, not filed). Owner: docs/OUTTAKE.md — the canonical list of what the project produces and where each kind lands is the operational definition.

Superseded 2026-10-06 by role (below); kept for the files that still say "surface". A place where work happened, with its own capabilities and limits; FLOW.md listed six (project chat, Cowork, Claude Code, Claude Design, the Differential, the Synthesist). The list tracked products and modes. The whole-project review of 2026-10-04/05 replaced it with roles, because what matters for bias is what a role is given and must not see, not which product it runs in.

Something that is given inputs and produces outputs under a stated blindness. FLOW.md's "Who does what" table owns the list (fifteen rows on 2026-10-06: the owner, the codifier, the programme, the exploratory chat, lab chats, reading chats, the tool chat, the designer, the readers, the sighted pass, the panel in the artifact, the panel in the runner, the Synthesist, the database, the ground). Blindness is one of four grades and is measured, not assumed: construction (holds nothing but its prompt; measured by asking), envelope (not handed the lead, but holding the project's rules, the owner's preferences and tools), discipline (told not to read, and says so), sighted. Owner: FLOW.md.

A file in synthesist-init/ — dictionary.md, taste.md, anti-taste.md, method.md, and one per held disposition. A seed is a document on disk. Owner: docs/GENERATORS-AND-SEATS.md §5.

The prompt assembled from a generator's seeds and sent with every call: dictionary.md plus its disposition seed, and nothing else — not method.md, which is codifier discipline. Seed = the file; init package = what is built from it and sent. Corrected 2026-09-21: this said "cached … sent once, never re-pasted." The sample contract has no system role and no prefix caching — its cache is answer replay — so the package is re-sent every call. The bank's cost advantage comes from bounded history, not from a cached seed (docs/GENERATORS-AND-SEATS.md §5). Owner: docs/GENERATORS-AND-SEATS.md §5.

Three distinct things, now distinguished by name:

• the bank trial — the manual multi-chat test that gates building the generator bank: do dispositions genuinely diverge? (docs/GENERATORS-AND-SEATS.md §6). Owner: G&S §6.
• the cold trial — the single-question taste-vs-control test already run. It showed convergence and was underpowered: disposition needs accumulated depth to act, which one cold question cannot reach. It is not the gate.
• the depth trial — the accumulated-depth test that is the gate. Not yet run.
• the Differential's shakedown loops — the two trial runs in docs/procedure-differential-tool.md §9 that produced its current design. Unrelated to the above. Owner: the procedure doc.

A blind connection the Synthesist returns to unbidden across unrelated subjects. Ruling 2026-09-21: recurrence earns it a row in OPS.md's Watching tier — a one-instance lesson on record — and not a row in Checks. Promotion to Checks still requires the two-instance bar, independently met. Recurrence inside one instrument is one instance, however many times it recurs. This tightens docs/SYNTHESIST.md §5, which read as though recurrence completed the promotion. Owner: OPS.md (the tiers); marker and bar: docs/OUTTAKE.md.

Operational knowledge the human needs and would otherwise rediscover: commands, environment quirks, setup steps, procedures, the difference between two errors that look alike. Not governing rules, definitions or design decisions — those have owners in this file, and filing one into MANUAL is how a second owner appears. The codifier files these unprompted on the second asking (docs/CODIFIER.md §4.8). Owner: MANUAL.md.

The surface that owns how things look, and never what they say. It produces mockups and the design system; it does not write copy, name anything, or decide what a page contains — content comes from the registries and the wording from the doc that owns the term. It is a codifier-side tool, not a blind one: the membrane does not apply to it. Giving it case IDs, coordinate names and real filed content is correct and necessary, because it has to lay out the actual thing. Blindness is the Synthesist's property, for the Synthesist's reason (association without field loyalty); a designer who cannot see the content designs for imaginary content. Owner: FLOW.md (the surface list and the design path). Its output's owner is docs/DESIGN-SYSTEM.md.

The shared visual vocabulary — palette, type scale, spacing — that every visual surface draws from instead of carrying its own. Owner: docs/DESIGN-SYSTEM.md. Accepted mockups: docs/design/.

The codifier's holding pen. During a conversation the codifier accumulates a working list of recognised filings — case, run, probe, note, OPS entry, TODO — and flushes it to Cowork as one batched prompt at the end, rather than a round-trip per item. It reduces context-switching and token cost. It is not a registry, it is not filed, and nothing in it is committed to until it is flushed. An item in the queue has no id, no frontmatter and no existence outside the conversation; a queue that is never flushed has filed nothing, which is exactly the return-path failure notes/asked.md exists to catch. Owner: docs/CODIFIER.md §4.7.

The Synthesist's contract: it receives facts and tensions, never resolutions or vocabulary; and it must be an incognito chat, because memory is the dominant leak and blindness cannot be restored retroactively. Owner: docs/SYNTHESIST.md §3 — the rule. The procedure that enforces it is MANUAL.md, Before pasting into a blind generator chat: the rule has one owner, the checklist has another, and the split is deliberate — the human runs the checklist, so it lives with the other things the human runs.

A run frontmatter field, and the only place a run's result is stored as a token. Four values, and no others:

Set by the codifier when a run is scored. Never computed by a generator. Judging a verdict against a falsifier is the valve's job — the resistance between a result and its filing — and a page generator inferring it would be the instrument grading its own exam. Before this field existed, a run whose falsifier fired rendered identically to one that confirmed.

Distinct from the two fields beside it. state: says where the run is in its lifecycle; verdict: is prose, free text, for a human; outcome: is the token the checks and the templates read. A run carries outcome: only when it has been scored — an unscored run has no outcome, and absence is not unanticipated. Owner: docs/OUTTAKE.md (the run row — the field list); the vocabulary above is this file's.

The five conditions a record is drawn in — open, running, settled, falsified, held — with a glyph, a word and a colour each (docs/DESIGN-SYSTEM.md §4). They are a display vocabulary, not a registry vocabulary: nothing on disk stores a display state, and no registry may adopt one of these words as a state: value. The registries keep their own words; this table is the only mapping, and a generator holds it in exactly one function.

The registries do not agree with each other and were never meant to: lab/make_site.py has CASE_ORDER = [open, partial, settled] for cases and ORDER = [draft, open, run, superseded, harvested] for runs.

Notes (added 2026-09-28, owner-approved). A note is a claim or a theorem, not a test, so it never carries an outcome and has no Open/Settled/Falsified mark: current draws with no mark, as exemplars do, and superseded or harvested take the retired modifier. The map redesign (docs/MAP-REDESIGN-BRIEF.md) puts notes on the map as threads, which is what forced the row.

held is state == "draft" OR blocked_on non-empty — never state: draft alone. Run 023 is the reason: it is state: open with a blocked_on, so keying on the state alone draws it as though nothing were stopping it. blocked_on is also the text to show; the sentence in it is the useful part of the record.

falsified is read from outcome:, never computed. See outcome above. A run with a verdict: and no outcome: is a scoring that never finished, and renders settled — which is the right shape with the wrong meaning. check_harvest_ledger's sibling check should catch it.

Retired is a modifier, not a sixth state. A retired record keeps whatever display state it reached, drawn in state-retired with its id struck through, and is excluded from every count.

Precedence, when more than one rule fires, in this order: retired → held → outcome: → state:. So a superseded blocked run is retired, and a blocked run is held whatever its state says.

Cases have no falsified and no held; runs have no running. Both gaps are real and stay visible rather than being papered over: a case is falsified through the run that settles it, and nothing in the run vocabulary means started but not finished. If a run state for work in flight is ever wanted, it is a new state: token and a row in this table, not a reinterpretation of open.

Taxonomies are not display states. form, exemplar_kind and probe type are set as plain mono text with no colour and no glyph. The five state colours are the system's entire colour budget. Owner: this file — the mapping. The glyphs, colours and geometry: docs/DESIGN-SYSTEM.md §4. The registry vocabularies themselves: docs/OUTTAKE.md.

A conjecture a run could falsify, with the runs arranged to chase it: numbered lines, dated status paragraphs, one rewritten Distilled section, and a ledger of what it has written back to other records. Filed in programmes/; a run sealed under one carries programme: PG-NN. The codifier's and the owner's instrument only: not a Synthesist term, and neither panels nor the bank see it. Owner: docs/PROGRAMMES.md.

One idea asked of every host — a layer above programmes (host → programme → theme), adopted 2026-10-22. A theme restates results (present / broken / hidden, for symmetry) and never runs; a prediction it produces is sealed by the programme that owns the host, with from: naming the theme file. Its gate is stricter than a programme's (name the instance, the trichotomy, and the instrument) and it carries a disqualifier (one sealable prediction within a month, or demotion to a glossary line). Filed in themes/<name>.md; seen by the codifier and the owner only — never panels, the Synthesist, lab, tool or reading chats. The 2026-10-11 "OPS themes" draft used the word informally for a grouping of rules; that use is not this term. Owner: docs/design/2026-10-21-theme-layer.md until CHARTER absorbs it.

The derived SQLite file holding every number a lab run produced, at the grain the questions live at (pattern, graph, sample set, sample, statistic), rebuilt from the record and never the record itself. Carries the quarantine column that enforces predict-then-seal on sample sets, and the statistic dictionary (lab/db/statistics.json), which owns the names of numbers: a statistic's name is defined there, not here, and this glossary owns terms, not statistics. Codifier-side; the Differential and the bank never see it. Owner: docs/DATABASE.md.

A query over the lab database that asks what form a number has, where the look-back asks how numbers move together: the algebraic degree of an exact value, a recurrence in an integer sequence, a measured value's neighbours in a frozen table of constants, or two unrelated measured values that agree. Every match on a measured number is printed with the count chance would give. Output is lead rows, tips and not results. Codifier-side. Owner: docs/DATABASE.md.

Owner: docs/design/2026-10-24-units-as-ground.md (§0, §4; ruled by the owner 2026-10-24, 20:28). A quantity's unit is its character under one of the project's rulers: how its number changes under zoom, zoom by 3 only, size N, or order in 1/k. The eight names, as ruled 2026-10-25, 10:00, are breadth ⟦𝖫⟧, mass ⟦𝖬⟧, tune ⟦𝖳⟧, drag ⟦𝖣⟧, burst mass ⟦𝖡⟧, tooth ⟦𝖨⟧, ply ⟦𝖪⟧ and unity ⟦𝟣⟧. They replace side, grade and pure, which collided. §4 of the owner doc gives what each means, and §2a gives each ruler's exponents. Mass here is a count of cells, never a physical mass. Tooth extends PG-03's tooth k: the same object, read as a unit. Ply is an order in 1/k; grade stays the blindness levels' word. Unity is the identity of the units group, not a ninth unit. A passing units check supports no value (§8). Not to be confused with a ring-theory unit, an invertible element (±1 in ℤ); in arithmetic the project's units are the primes (§20).

Owner: docs/CHARTER.md. The whole apparatus — loop, roles, rules, programmes, readers, panel, database, ground — that keeps the project's predictions honest; named 2026-10-06. Not the map, not the mathematics.

Owner: FLOW.md (step 7 of the loop). Programmes learning from each other — failures and assumptions included — with SHARED.md, the drift and scale screens, the record backlog and the memory check. Settled 2026-10-06; integration pass (docs/PROGRAMME-AUDIT.md §7) is the retired name for the same step.

Owner: FLOW.md (Naming a chat). A lab, reading or tool chat is opened for one task and archived when it ends; its last line is CHAT STATUS: complete — archive this chat or CHAT STATUS: continue — <reason>, so the owner knows which without reading back. A chat that must continue is the exception and names why.

Owner: FLOW.md (Questions back). A lab, reading or design chat's question to the codifier when its instructions do not match the disk; answered by a dated ruling in the run file, which says what an instruction means and never what is expected.

Owner: docs/BANDS.md. A reading is a value a screen shows with its source and as-of time; a band is the limits it is compared against; a sensor is the file and field that carries it in fixed form. "No sensor" means no file carries the value, which is different from the value being zero.

In the lab's programmes, the degrees of freedom a self-similar host's recursion drops where it joins copies of itself: on the Grigorchuk cell, the free cosets and zero-modes of the minimum bisections at the Schreier fibres, with the orphan eigenvalues conjectured to be the same thing. It is PG-02's object and is defined there. Owner: programmes/PG-02-automaton-plus-seam.md. Not a collision: on the carpets, "block seam", "seam links" and "seam dimension" (P-051, P-053, runs 083–097) are the literal boundary between two neighbouring blocks and the bonds across it: geometry, with no claim about what a recursion drops. Write "block seam" there when the two could be confused.

The filed kinds, each with a destination, a frontmatter shape and an enforcing check. Owner: docs/OUTTAKE.md — one table, one row per kind. Note the one surviving overload, left deliberately: "a digestion run" in SOP.md and takes/template.md means a pass through the digestion protocol, not a lab/runs/ entry. Flagged rather than renamed because the usage is confined to those two files and predates the registry.

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The rules every course in courses/src/ follows. Owner: docs/COURSE-STYLE.md (it declared itself the owner on 2026-09-30; recorded here 2026-10-04).

The per-panel .jsonl export under panels/dataset/, built by panels/dataset/export.py, read by the lab database's loader. Owner: docs/PANEL-DATASET.md.

Collisions open (2026-10-24, vocabulary cross-reading, R28_reading/vocab-cross/REPORT.md):

- T — eight meanings: pattern T (#26); the block operator T_op (PG-01, 119 on); Tₖ (075); the 448 (PG-02); T(μ) (065); temperature (040); T(new) (PG-03); T_{pB} (PG-04). Write the qualified form where two meet. Note: 053, 062, 075, 100, 101, 122, 132. - U, U′ — carpets U and U′ (#11, #12) against the rule's set U (127) and the unreachable set U′ (131). Write carpet U′ / U′_out. Note: 049, 051, 052, 127, 131. - λ — the multiplier R′(p*) (shared, PG-01 and PG-03) against λ₂(Lap) (108), the operator's second eigenvalue (PG-03:222), the stretch |λ|max (117) and the window width (129). Note: 108, 117. - Q — a run-local statistic (086, 095, 105, 089) against Q_n (PG-02) and T_op on non-empty subsets (PG-01:755). Cite Q with its run. Note: 086, 089, 095, 105. - k — rung k and rank k (PG-01; rank k, run 136) against k children, the size exponent, the sample column and tooth k (PG-03). Note: 100, 114, 117, 125, 128, 134. - B — PG-03's amplitude and B(α, β) against carpet B (055, 058). Note: 055, 058, 125. - rung — dictionary rung, rung k (PG-01; retired as a term with the ladder, 2026-10-25), rule rung (PG-03; entered as rung (b, s), 2026-10-25), E-row (the theme). Write "rung (b, s)" for PG-03's. Note: 106, 110, 111. - ladder — the boundary ladder (PG-01), the rule ladder (PG-03), the forced-situation ladder (the theme). Prose only; no note. - band — BANDS.md's band against PG-03's interval (retired) and PG-03's band rule / band family, and PG-02's spectral band. Fix GLOSSARY:474. - core — the ring core (PG-01; core / pendant part / island) and the network-reliability core (PG-01, run 132) against the map's core [R²(c), R(c)] (PG-03; prose only from 2026-10-25). Write "ring core" and "network-reliability core" in full. Note: 132. - hump — the hump of g₁ (PG-01) against hump map / hump rule (PG-03); both retired to prose only 2026-10-25 (PG-01 and PG-03 §1, Vocabulary rulings). Note: 114. - kind — frontmatter, programme_kind, coset kind (PG-02), object kind W/V/R/F (PG-04), number kind (dictionary). Note: 101 (retired sense, sealed), 116. - reading — the seal sense (GLOSSARY:430) against BANDS' screen reading (GLOSSARY:364) and the reading programme (PG-04), which docs/PROGRAMMES.md:86-90 does not define. - generator — the Synthesist unit (GLOSSARY:47) against PG-01's census generator. Add a "Not a collision" line. Note: 108, 122, 127. - gate — the case gate (GLOSSARY:427) against "error gate" (071, 107) and 105's lab gate. Note: 105, 107. - orbit / class — group orbit (PG-01 107, 119; PG-02; PG-04) against periodic orbit (PG-03). Note: 107, 114, 117, 119. - L, C1, S, W, V, R, F, M — single letters against line labels and other programmes' symbols. Write "line C1", "step S1", "kind W", "the list L". Note: 053, 062, 095, 107, 112, 116, 129. - slope — R′(p*) (058) against local or pair slope (OPS). Note: 058. - inherited — INHERITED (065) against INH⁺ (113). Note only. - D_A (2026-10-25) — run 098's D_A = p_med(#22) − p_med(#24) (PG-01, beside D_G) against run 130's comb statistic D_A = O(H7) − ¼E(H7) (PG-03). Cite D_A with its run. - gap (2026-10-25) — the crossing gap (t₂ − t)/w (PG-01, run 109) against L8's threshold gap, 094's gap′ and the laggard gap (retired 2026-10-25). Write "crossing gap". (One line per open collision, dated; the console reads this list — docs/BANDS.md, GLOSS.COLL.)

Promoted 2026-10-24 (the same pass, §3; each term's definition stays in its owner's block, and this table points there):

"lean" is retired to prose only (PG-03, 2026-10-25).

Collisions resolved 2026-10-04 (docs/PROGRAMME-AUDIT.md §2.2, §6): seam — PG-01 writes "block seam" and "dropped share"; fibre — PG-01 writes "polynomial fibre"; twin — PG-01's word; PG-02 writes "zero-mode pair" and "abelian / degeneracy control"; wall — PG-01's word; PG-02's sense retired with its lead; pair — PG-03's word; PG-01 writes "twin pair", "pair slope"; kind — PG-02 writes "coset kind"; "kind of minimum" retired; rest / remainder — PG-02: "the rest" (edges) and "non-flipping share"; gate — the case gate only; run controls are "pre-draw controls"; dissolved — programmes only; channel — "mirror channel", "coarse channel"; blind reader — OPS's sense only; T (symbol) — reopened 2026-10-24 (eight meanings; see Collisions open).

Four different things share the word, and a sentence that uses it names its form: - reversible law (microscopic): the dynamics run backward, velocities flipped, is again a solution (Newton, Hamilton). Phase-space volume is kept (Liouville) and nothing is lost. - bulk irreversibility (macroscopic): coarse-grained variables approach equilibrium and entropy rises, although every trajectory is reversible. It comes from coarse-graining plus a low-entropy start (Boltzmann's answer to Loschmidt). - detailed balance (statistical): a stochastic process at equilibrium is indistinguishable from its time reversal, π_i P_ij = π_j P_ji. The matrix is self-adjoint in the π-weighted inner product. This is the form the symmetry theme's E1 forces. A chain with detailed balance still relaxes irreversibly to π (an H-theorem); what it lacks is steady circulating currents. - many-to-one (logical): a map that merges states loses information (Landauer). A renormalisation step is this kind.

"Reversible individually, irreversible in bulk" is the first form together with the second.

Why these four (the two-dial grid, 2026-10-23). Each form answers "can you get back?" with two dials set: what is reversed (one state, or a distribution) and what is asked of the reverse (that an inverse exists, or that the inverse is the same law). One state with an inverse that exists: fails for many-to-one. One state with the same law backwards: the reversible law. A distribution with an inverse that exists: fails for bulk evolution, whose inverse is not a probability process. A distribution with the same law backwards: detailed balance. A further dial (classical or quantum) would double the grid. Forward is the direction in which the law does not depend on the state: predicting needs only the present, and retrodicting needs a prior (Bayes).