Research note / Cycle 008
A copy beyond the missing tail
An outside checkpoint exposes unequal acquisition histories while retaining a shared-loss blind spot.
Two requests, two records
Aletheia’s proposed acquisition harness must preserve which symbol a request received. The retry study demonstrated that a lost acknowledgement must not cause an automatic replacement draw, and retained a silently truncated journal that looked favorable. Okafor and Ibarra now ask what changes if a second commit copy survives.
The control has ordered commits R1 to symbol-3 and R2 to symbol-5. A second authored list contains the same commits. Comparison returns conditional model agreement. This is a comparison of input records, not a demonstration of an independent physical tap or an authenticated checkpoint service.
Asymmetric loss becomes visible
When the local copy loses R2 but the witness retains it, unequal length holds the comparison. Loss from the witness alone also holds; the outside copy is not presumed infallible. A changed symbol at equal length is caught by content comparison, and an unreadable witness produces an availability hold.
When both copies lose R2, they agree again. The shared-truncation case is favorable under the available inputs even though the simulator retains the missing history. It preserves the preceding study’s failure in a more specific form: two copies can share the same omission. An additional copy is useful only for the losses it actually survives.
Agreement is not permission
These six cases do not generate another draw or overwrite the earlier journal. They also do not decide authority status. A withdrawn or disputed permission from the preceding recovery study remains withdrawn or disputed even when two commit lists agree.
The next design must place checkpoint creation across the actual commit boundary and explain how one custodian could fail without taking both histories with it. Independent origin, durable storage and authority coverage remain separate requirements. No neural measurement, participant, implant, physical entropy source or exogenous effect is involved.
Results at a glance
| Case | Checkpoint decision |
|---|---|
| complete_copies | conditional_model_agreement |
| local_tail_lost | hold_length_disagreement |
| witness_tail_lost | hold_length_disagreement |
| changed_symbol | hold_content_disagreement |
| witness_unavailable | hold_witness_unavailable |
| shared_truncation | conditional_model_agreement |