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Quality & freezing

Open contribution needs a trust boundary. It sits between the uncurated inbox and the curated pool.

The QA pass

Anyone can run the aggregation pass; it validates each inbox shard against the contract and the current pool, then promotes it or quarantines it with a reason. The gates, in order:

  1. walk_profile match — same simulator/version/params, so the shard is poolable.
  2. Save-grid match — same dt and n_t.
  3. Seed independence — the seed isn't already used.
  4. Signature — if the shard is signed, the signature must verify; a present-but-broken signature (tampered payload or forged) is quarantined.
  5. Statistical consistency — the shard agrees with the pool within a z-threshold on a diffusion battery.

  • Consistency uses walker counts

    A candidate's expected noise is derived from its walker count against the pool's measured floor — not its own self-reported floor, which it could inflate to hide a bias. The test can't be gamed by lying about your own error bars.

  • Seed the pool for power

    A young, unseeded pool can't reject a moderate outlier — the reference is too noisy. So each target is seeded with a trusted coordinator shard, giving QA discriminating power from the first submission.

Freeze → cite

When the measured floor clears σ*, the pool is merged into a single complete.rpk plus a Zenodo-ready snapshot: a freeze manifest, a CITATION.cff, and the archived geometry. The frozen substrate lists its contributors and their walker counts.

The DOI gate is manual

Freezing only prepares the deposit. A human reviews it, deposits to Zenodo, and mints the DOI — then records it back into the snapshot. Minting a permanent identifier is a deliberate act, never automated.