The felt passage of time is the cooling of the activation field, not a tick
count and not an elapsed-seconds readout. engram_age_field(delta_ms) cools the
field (working_memory_weight + background_activation) by the caller's MEASURED
wall-clock delta with a pure exponential exp(-dt/TC) — no per-call floor — so it
is exactly scale-invariant: N ticks summing to the same elapsed time produce the
same total cooling. It returns the cooling MAGNITUDE (1-exp(-dt/TC), a bounded
[0,1) drift signal), never elapsed seconds.
Reboot = anesthesia: a global last-tick wall-clock stamp is persisted to a
sidecar (chrono_last_tick) in the data dir. engram_age_field_catchup() reads it
on boot, applies ONE cooling for the whole unconscious gap, refreshes the stamp,
and reports the magnitude — timestamps are bookkeeping to COMPUTE the drift,
never the felt signal. TC env-tunable via ENGRAM_CHRONO_TC (default 3600s).
All inert unless ENGRAM_CHRONOCEPTION is set → OFF path byte-identical.
MEASURED on a copy (throwaway HOME, TC=3600s):
- Cooling scales with dt, matching 1-exp(-dt/TC) to 1e-6: dt=600s->0.1535,
1800s->0.3935, 3600s->0.6321, 7200s->0.8647.
- Scale-invariance EXACT: age(dt) once vs age(dt/N) N times gives identical
field sum (|delta|=0.0) for N=2, 10, 100.
- Reboot catch-up over a 1h gap cooled the field 0.60->0.4415 in one shot,
magnitude 0.6321, bounded in [0,1).
- Flag OFF: age & catchup return 0, field untouched (sum 1.2).
ASan+UBSan clean.
The co-activation accrual already works (hebb is an EWMA over co-firing); what
was missing is the promotion layer from design §9 that turns accrual into
durable structure. This adds it on top, entirely behind ENGRAM_CONSOLIDATION so
the OFF path is byte-identical to trunk.
CONNECTION threshold ("connection IS consolidation"): when a strongly-firing
InternalStateEvent is created (salience >= ENGRAM_CONSOL_CONN_MIN, default 0.6),
wire hebbian-associate edges from it to the top-K working-memory nodes active at
that instant (ENGRAM_CONSOL_WM_TOPK, default 5), provenance-tagged
"consolidated-from-ISE" and dedup-guarded. A sub-threshold ISE forms nothing (a
shower thought) and drifts out at the existing 48h prune.
PERMANENCE threshold (rare): engram_consolidate_permanence(node) marks a node
whose rehearsed ACT-R base-level clears ENGRAM_CONSOL_PERM_MIN durable via a
reversible metadata marker; engram_prune_telemetry then exempts it (gated, so no
trunk node is ever affected). Idempotent, no double-promote.
Thresholds are env-tunable for A/B without a rebuild.
MEASURED on a copy (throwaway HOME):
- Headline accrual curve (flag OFF, pure trunk) over N co-activations of a wired
pair — hebb_max: N=1 -> 1e-4 (=ETA), N=100 -> 0.010, N=1625 -> 0.150
(LINK_MIN, where an unwired pair consolidates), N=3000 -> 0.259; tracks the
analytic EWMA 1-0.9999^N within measurement noise (co-activation P~1).
- Strong ISE wired 2 edges to exactly the wm_top nodes (hebb-a, hebb-b); weak
ISE formed 0; edges carry the reversible provenance marker.
- Promoted node survived the 48h prune (2->1 nodes); ephemeral ISE swept.
- Flag OFF: ISE creation added 0 edges, permanence returned 0 (no-op).
ASan+UBSan clean.
Read routes (GET /api/embeddings, /api/graph/dump) need node embedding
vectors, but every consumer emit path deliberately drops the ~5.7KB emb
vector (include_emb=0) to stay under MCP token limits. Rather than perturb
that shared path, add a dedicated additive builtin that pages nodes WITH
their dense vector, emitting id/node_type/label/created_at/emb_dim plus emb
as a JSON array whose length equals emb_dim (so a consumer can verify the
vector round-trips). Un-embedded nodes emit emb_dim:0 / emb:[]. Same
salience-sorted, transparent-layer-skipped, bounded pagination as
engram_scan_nodes_json; default page 256.
Purely additive: engram_emit_node_json and the default include_emb=0 are
untouched, so every existing endpoint is byte-identical to trunk (verified:
scan_nodes_json still carries no emb). The HTTP route wiring in server.el is
DEFERRED to cutover per the elc-drift blocker (regenerating engram/dist
diverges ~285 lines with no source change); the builtin is exercised
directly by the pure-C gate instead.
Measured on a copy: len(emb)==emb_dim for all nodes, pagination disjoint,
existing path unchanged; full 256-node x 768-dim page = 16.7 ms / 1.18 MB.
ASan+UBSan clean.
Resolve 3 conflicts:
- lang/el-compiler/runtime/el_runtime.c: keep deletion (deprecated runtime fork;
single-source-of-truth is lang/runtime/, enforced by scripts/check-single-runtime.sh).
- lang/releases/v1.0.0-20260501/el_runtime.h: keep deletion (releases/ is a generated
artifact folder, not a source path; a release is a git tag, not a folder).
- lang/runtime/el_platform_win.h: union of dev's Windows port (#80: setsockopt optval
wrapper + curl-less libcurl stubs) and our fsync(->_commit) shim needed by engram_store WAL.
Nothing in dev's build consumes the deprecated fork or releases/ folder.
Establish lang/runtime/ as the ONE canonical el runtime (from the active
runtime that carries hebb/emb persistence + the new WAL); repoint the el CI
publish, engram build, elb default, and in-repo build scripts to it; delete
the el-compiler/runtime + lang/releases/ forks; add scripts/check-single-runtime.sh
drift guard.
Fixes a live prod bug: the el CI published el-runtime-c/-h from the LAGGING
el-compiler fork (0 hebb refs), so the shipped soul never persisted Hebbian
edge weights — learned co-activation was wiped on every restart. Publishing
from canonical ships the stranded 'learning that cannot outlive the process'
fix.
WAL storage engine + integrity fixes (DELETE->tombstone + store-layer
protection, safe data-dir default) ride in behind ENGRAM_WAL (default off =
byte-identical to today). Verified: engram elb per-module build clean, WAL
gate 66/66, native smoke ok, drift-guard green.
will.anderson