Public law
Open Specification
Defines the normative architecture, constitutional invariants, derivation lattice, and schema contracts. Current experimental reference: v1.1.3 / C₁.
Open the specification ↗Open architecture
The Palimpsestus Open Spec
A public specification and experimental research program for adaptive systems that preserve provenance, warrant (what the available evidence justifies), historical standing, uncertainty, and accountable state change.
Separation of concerns
What must hold is not the same thing as how it is implemented.
The public architecture is split into specification, conformance, and implementation so implementations can vary without changing the thing being tested.
Public verifier
Conformance Suite
Checks machine-readable structural and provenance obligations against a pinned specification. Passing conformance means those checks pass; it does not establish truth, security, or utility.
Open the conformance suite ↗Realization
Implementation
Particular runtime mechanisms, controllers, prompts, search strategies, or domain integrations are implementations of the architecture, not the architecture itself.
Core experimental commitments
Plain-language summary. The Open Specification is authoritative.
Provenance fidelity: claims and state changes should not erase ancestry or inflate warrant beyond what the evidence justifies.
Situated state: an actor does not reason from nowhere; present capability depends on inherited state and current relations.
Accountable transition: future action is constrained by what is structurally possible, historically reachable, and currently warranted.
Preserved uncertainty: unresolved possibilities need not be collapsed merely to obtain a single answer.
Compression with obligations: representation may be reduced only insofar as the warrant needed for later action is preserved.
Research posture
The point is not to accumulate examples.
The test is whether a frozen specification produces prospective, discriminating behavior across independently built implementations and domains.
Where does the architecture continue to earn its claims, what do alternatives do better, and where does Palimpsestus break?