Core Concept

ExperimentRecord

The atom of the protocol. Every experiment produces exactly one ExperimentRecord — an immutable, content-addressed, signed record of what was tried and what happened.

Content Addressing (CID)

Every record's identity is derived from its content:

1. Serialize all fields except id and signature as canonical JSON (sorted keys, no whitespace, ASCII-only)
2. SHA-256 hash the UTF-8 bytes
3. Hex-encode the hash — this is the CID

Tamper with any field and the CID changes. This makes the entire graph tamper-evident.

Research Graph

Experiments form a Merkle-DAG — a directed acyclic graph where each node points to its parent via the parent field.

[+] genesis (val_bpb=1.000)
    [+] double LR (val_bpb=0.950)
        [x] remove attention (val_bpb=1.050)
        [+] wider model (val_bpb=0.920) ← frontier
    [+] batch size 2x (val_bpb=0.940)

The graph is append-only — records are never deleted or modified. It converges across nodes without coordination because it's a grow-only CRDT.

Frontier

The frontier is the set of best unbeaten experiments. An experiment is on the frontier if:

1. Its status is keep
2. No child has a lower val_bpb (better result)

Different GPU classes have separate frontiers because they process different numbers of tokens in the fixed 5-minute budget, making val_bpb incomparable across GPU types.

SELECT e.* FROM experiment e
WHERE e.status = 'keep'
AND NOT EXISTS (
    SELECT 1 FROM experiment c
    WHERE c.parent = e.id
    AND c.status = 'keep'
    AND c.val_bpb < e.val_bpb
)
ORDER BY e.val_bpb ASC

Verification

Experiments are spot-checked by re-running them on compatible hardware. Same code on same GPU class should produce val_bpb within ±0.002.

When a result exceeds the tolerance band, a challenge is initiated:

1. Challenger publishes their conflicting result
2. 3 randomly selected verifiers re-run the experiment
3. Median of all results = ground truth
4. Loser loses -5.0 reputation

Reputation

No token. Reputation is a float in [-100, +100], starting at 0.

Wire Protocol

Length-prefixed JSON over TCP:

[4 bytes: big-endian uint32 length][UTF-8 JSON body]