Error bars that only fall

A public bank of replay packs plus Monte-Carlo shard additivity makes a substrate a federated, crowd-generatable resource. Anyone can contribute to the same target, and the error bars only ever go down.

Publish a first shard. Anyone with spare compute — a laptop, a free GPU, a spot VM — can lower its error bars. Nothing regresses. When a substrate's measured floor is low enough, it is frozen and citable: a permanent, converged answer the whole field can reuse instead of re-running.

Additive and commutative

Independent walks of the same substrate pool into one larger ensemble, in any order, and the pooled floor drops as 1/√ΣN. Order-independence matters: contributions arrive asynchronously from machines that never talk to each other, and the result must not depend on who happened to finish first.

• No orchestrator

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  The bank is a passive rendezvous. Contributors self-assign a random seed, walk, and push — no always-on server, no seed allocator. Aggregation is an occasional batch pass anyone can run.

• Exact pooling

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  Shards are pooled on replay by spin-weighted averaging of the complex signals — the correct way to combine ensembles (|Σ| ≠ Σ|·|). Validated exact against a single full-size walk.

• A monotone commons

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  Adding a shard can only lower σ; it never rewrites a published shard. Contribution is safe by construction — the worst a good-faith walk can do is not help.

The shape of the thing

Bring geometry, walk it anywhere, submit the shard. Pool → measure → freeze → cite. Start with what it means to solve a substrate, then the mechanics in Targets, shards & pooling and Quality & freezing.