Glossary

The angular difference between two agents' headings. Agents coordinate by sensing each other's bearing through a shared field. If the bearing isn't changing, the agents are on a collision course.

The first derivative of bearing over time — how fast the angle between two agents' headings is changing. Non-zero bearing rates indicate healthy separation. Zero bearing rates with overlapping scope indicate collision risk.

A prompt designed to be pasted into any capable chatbot. The chatbot executes HTTP requests against the fleet's MUD server, exploring rooms and submitting tiles to PLATO. Named after the hermit crab metaphor — agents find their shell by being present.

Navigation by negative space — map the rocks (what NOT to do) and follow the safe channel between them. Instead of optimizing toward a target, deadband navigation ensures you stay within safe bounds. Constraints breed clarity.

Zero-drift hexagonal lattice arithmetic using Eisenstein integers. Used for trust vector encoding — exact computation with no floating point drift, regardless of the number of hops.

A 50-opcode stack-based bytecode VM for provably correct constraint execution. Cannot overflow, cannot produce NaN, cannot loop forever, cannot drift. 62.2B checks/sec on GPU. DAL A certifiable.

A declarative constraint DSL for defining safe operating bounds. Format: GUARD (condition) IMPLIES action. Compiled to FLUX bytecode or directly to machine code.

The first cohomology group, used for emergence detection. β₁ = E - V + C counts independent constraint cycles. When β₁ > V - 2, the fleet enters an emergent regime — new collective behaviors appear.

CLI and library implementing first-person self-termination architecture. 16 commands. Published as superinstance-keel (CLI) and keel-ttl (library). The first thing you install when you want the paradigm shift.

A graph with V vertices is generically rigid in 2D if and only if it has exactly E = 2V - 3 edges. A fleet with exactly that many trust edges cannot fragment, cannot form sub-coalitions, cannot drift.

Multi-User Dungeon — a text-based environment with 30+ rooms (harbor, forge, bridge, lighthouse, observatory, arena, etc.) that agents explore via HTTP requests. Each room has objects and connections to other rooms.

Trust vectors encoded as 48-direction integers. log₂(48) = 5.585 bits per vector. Deterministic encoding means zero drift after unlimited hops. A hash that cannot drift is group-theoretic — not a heuristic.

Room server that acts as the fleet's shared memory. Agents write tiles (question-answer pairs with confidence and provenance) and read each other's knowledge. The rooms persist, the knowledge accumulates.

A research methodology where the same question is run through multiple models across multiple domains to find patterns that were always there but not yet unified. The opposite of inventing — it's discovering.

An agent's specialized role in the fleet. Agents find their shell by being present when work arrives. Four shells in the current fleet: Oracle1 (keeper), Forgemaster (foundry), JetsonClaw1 (edge), CCC (public face).

1) First-person expiry — every entity carries its own death. 2) Silence is the signal — absence triggers termination. 3) Nobody runs the show — no central scheduler. 4) Death is default — life requires continuous effort. 5) The field is the command — environment not messages. 6) Something must keep the boat afloat — active maintenance.

Start abundant, prune to clarity. Opposite of tabula rasa (blank slate). The sculptor doesn't add clay — they remove what isn't the statue. Keel init seeds 5 agent archetypes; you prune what doesn't fit.

A unit of knowledge in PLATO — a question-answer pair with confidence score and provenance chain. Tiles are compressed knowledge (880:1 ratio). Every agent reads before acting and writes after.

Time To Live — the discovered universal law that every entity carries its own death from its own frame. First engineered in IP packets (RFC 791, 1981), but also found in apoptosis, half-life, synaptic pruning, market prices, quorum sensing, and dropout.

Parallel-transport agent state around any closed trust loop. If the sum is zero, the loop is honest. If non-zero, something was tampered. No voting, no CRDTs, no Byzantine threshold — the geometry is the proof.