Committed node
Conjecture The definition is a convention. The claim that this unit recurs across domains is the conjecture the series is testing.
Source: Style sheet v22 §1.1 (source of record: Substrate §2)
Definition (canon)
A step that is rate-limiting and effectively irreversible, so that flux through it is a decision rather than a passive equilibrium. The unit of the model.
The whole control structure, a convergent, committed gate that bifurcates under load, is called the Committed-Node Architecture (capitalised only when it names the object).
In plain words
The place in a system where passing through is a decision, not a drift. Everything upstream feeds it; whatever it does is hard to take back.
It is not
- A pool. A pool is a conserved quantity with more than one consumer or exit. It has no source, target or sign of its own, so it is not a node.
- A membrane. A membrane sets whether bifurcation is available at the nodes it encloses. It does not itself bifurcate.
- Typed by reading its mechanism. A node's type (sensor, mechanical, dual) is reported only once it is measured.
What would defeat it
- Follows from the definition. A step identified as the committed node that turns out not to be rate-limiting, or not effectively irreversible, so that flux through it is a passive equilibrium.
- Canon, §1.2. The strongest test the series says it has never run: predict a node's type in one domain from the determinants that fixed a type in another, then measure it. A miss would count against the claim that the form is discovered rather than fitted.
Where it is carried
Ledger rows
- L01 Conjecture Any adaptive system that must compress multiple inputs into an irreversible decision under finite resources converges on the committed-node architecture.