research.openie.dev
Glossary
Terms used on this site. Every paper also defines the terms it uses, so no paper depends on this page.
- commit gate
- A check that runs before an irreversible action. A proposal may not authorize itself. The gate commits or refuses and writes a receipt.
- receipt
- A record written for every decision: the prediction and its timestamp before the act, the outcome, the match, the joules by label, and the refusal reason if any.
- completeness predicate C(z)
- A written test that maps the state z of a task to 0 or 1, for example tests pass, a proof checks, or an output matches a reference. A task is complete when C(z) = 1.
- energy to correct completion (J*)
- The least expected energy, in joules (J), that a system needs to reach C(z) = 1 with failure probability at most δ. Systems that pass are ordered by J*; ordering by a real number is a total preorder.
- value of information (VoI)
- The expected gain in a decision's payoff from observing a quantity before deciding, minus the cost of observing it (Howard, 1966).
- impedance tax
- The extra work a machine consumer does because information arrives in a format made for people to read: encode, parse, tokenize and, for a model, read the extra tokens. Defined with units in "AI" Reads Human; no joule value is claimed for it yet.
- token
- The unit a language model reads, a piece of text produced by a tokenizer. The same records give different token counts in different formats and under different tokenizers.
- Landauer bound
- The minimum heat dissipated by erasing one bit at temperature T: k_B T ln 2, about 2.87 × 10⁻²¹ J at 300 K (Landauer, 1961).
- cheapest-first cascade
- An order of mechanisms (gears) tried from lowest to highest expected energy, stopping at the first that passes the check. Expected energy is minimized by trying gears in decreasing order of p_i / c_i, with p_i the pass probability and c_i the expected energy (Simon and Kadane, 1975).
- Mixture of Limits
- The rule of using the cheapest gear that passes the check and stopping when further spend cannot change C(z). The cheapest-first cascade is one instance.
- σ-law selector
- A selector that picks the next act by the ratio of pass probability to energy cost and stops when the next act's expected gain is below its energy cost.
- plateau
- The least spend that closes a task. Past it, further tokens, parameters or joules cannot change C(z).
- replay class
- A label on an answer stating how it was produced. An answer labeled ModelGenerated cannot be relabeled Deterministic.
- software reference implementation
- The software used to test a claim without board-level metering. Its energy figures are estimates.
- est_j
- An analytical energy estimate: operation counts times stated energy constants, in joules.
- reported_j
- An energy figure read from an operating-system or on-chip counter, such as RAPL package energy minus a stated idle baseline.
- measured_j
- A joule reading from an external wall or shunt meter on a named rail, with its calibration stated. Never summed with reported_j, est_j or trajectory_j.
- trajectory_j
- Work computed from measured physical trajectories and a calibrated potential, for physical act cycles near the k_B T scale.
- evidence classes
- Modeled: a stated formula. Simulated: a program or hardware-description run. Measured: a named meter on a stated device and workload.
- board_metered
- A page flag that is true only when a labeled meter returned a board energy reading for that paper.
- Form and fit
- A program written as a state machine P = (S, E, δ, D, λ): states, events, a pure step function, an append-only log whose fold is the state, and outputs. The form is that shape (Gurevich's Abstract State Machine theorem); the fit is a program's vocabulary, rules and initial state.
- Reality Code Engine (RCE)
- A programming system, studied in its own paper, in which a program is written once as a Form and code in other languages is generated from it.
- Metabolic Intelligence
- A class of computer intelligence designed to run inside a fixed energy budget B, studied in its own white paper.
- WCA (Wise Computer Automation)
- The Rust software implementation of the commit gate studied in Metered Commit Gates, Part I.
- proposed Universal Law of Agency
- A proposed definition of an agent with an energy budget and a refusal rule, stated in the agency paper. It is a proposal.