Integrity-Modulated Discovery Traversal

Mechanism

A discovery result, in the cognition patent's Chapter 3 architecture, is not a bare value. It is a structured artifact carrying three lineage components alongside its payload. The anchor lineage records the originating canonical anchor: the declared starting point of the discovery, including the policy version under which the anchor was authorized and the governance role that authored the anchor. The traversal lineage records the ordered sequence of evaluative steps that connect the anchor to the result, with each step recording its predicate, its inputs, and its admissibility under the prevailing integrity field. The governance class records the policy class under which the result is licensed for use, including any restrictions on consumer role, deployment domain, or downstream composition.

Each consumer, before using a result, runs three independent checks. The anchor check confirms that the result's anchor lineage matches the consumer's declared expectation: that the anchor identifier, the policy version, and the governance signature are all consistent with what the consumer is authorized to consume. The traversal check confirms that every step in the traversal lineage was admissible at the time it was taken and that the chain is unbroken from anchor to result. The governance check confirms that the result's governance class is one the consumer is licensed to receive, given the consumer's own role and policy reference.

A mismatch on any check is treated as non-execution. The consumer records the mismatch, including which check failed and what the discrepancy was, into its own lineage. It does not proceed with a degraded version of the result, does not substitute a default, and does not request retransmission. Non-execution is a first-class outcome: downstream evaluators see a recorded non-execution event with its own structure rather than an absence of evidence.

Operating Parameters

The operative parameters for discovery integrity are: the anchor expectation set, declared per consumer in policy, naming the anchor identifiers and policy versions the consumer is authorized to accept; the traversal admissibility predicate, declaring what constitutes an admissible step at the time of traversal; the governance class table, mapping each consumer role to the governance classes it is licensed to receive; and the non-execution recording format, declaring what evidence is captured when a check fails.

Each parameter is bound to the consumer's policy reference, not to the producer's. This asymmetry is structural: the producer cannot declare its own results admissible by attaching a self-signed lineage. The consumer's checks consult the consumer's own policy and the governance authority's signed records, ensuring that admissibility is determined by the receiving side. A producer that drifts from authorized practice produces results that are simply not consumed, and the non-consumption is recorded against the producer.

The traversal admissibility predicate is itself parameterized by the integrity field. A step that was admissible under one integrity state may not be admissible under another. The traversal lineage records the integrity field state at each step, so a consumer evaluating the chain can verify that admissibility was satisfied step by step, not merely globally. This step-wise check defends against subtle drift in which an overall traversal looks plausible but contains individual steps that were taken under inadmissible field states.

Alternative Embodiments

In a single-consumer embodiment, the producer and consumer share a substrate, and the lineage components are passed by reference within a common memory region. The structural property that the consumer performs the checks remains intact even though the transport is local. In a federated embodiment, results are transmitted across substrate boundaries with the lineage components serialized; the consumer rebinds them to its local policy reference before checking. In a broadcast embodiment, a single result is offered to multiple consumers, each of which performs its own three checks against its own policy; some consumers may execute and others may declare non-execution from the same result.

Embodiments may also vary in the granularity of governance class. A coarse class table contains a small number of broad classes such as public, restricted, and privileged. A fine class table contains many narrow classes scoped to specific deployment domains, regulatory regimes, or operational contexts. Both are within the disclosed scope provided the consumer's class check is performed against a declared, signed table and not against a runtime inference.

A further embodiment introduces delegated checking, in which a consumer authorizes a trusted intermediary to perform the three checks on its behalf. The delegation itself is a declared, signed artifact in the consumer's lineage, and the intermediary's check outcomes are recorded with the same structure as direct checks. Delegation reduces per-consumer overhead in dense traversal graphs without weakening the structural guarantee, because the delegation contract is itself auditable.

Composition with Other Primitives

Discovery integrity composes with the integrity field, the forecasting primitive, and the confidence governance primitive. When a consumer declares non-execution, its integrity field records the event with a declared severity. Repeated non-executions within a window contribute to the violation count consumed by integrity collapse detection, so consistent producer-consumer mismatches eventually escalate. Forecasts that depend on a non-executed discovery do not emit; their own lineage records the upstream non-execution as the cause. Confidence governance reduces emitted confidence to reflect the missing evidence, with the reduction itself attributable to the recorded non-execution event.

Composition is again contractual. The consumer's three checks are declared in its policy reference, and the downstream primitives consult the consumer's lineage to observe execution and non-execution events. No primitive infers consumption from behavior; all consumption is explicitly recorded.

Implementation Considerations

A reference implementation represents each lineage component as a Merkle-rooted record signed under the relevant governance authority's key at the moment of authorship. The anchor lineage is rooted in the policy registry that declared the anchor; the traversal lineage is rooted in the integrity field's signed state at the originating step; the governance class is rooted in the policy class table that licensed the result. Verification at the consumer reduces to root comparison and signature verification, both of which are constant-time per check given precomputed roots in the consumer's policy reference.

Non-execution recording uses the same lineage format as execution recording, distinguished only by an outcome field set to non-execution and an attached evidence package naming which check failed and why. Downstream consumers, including audit consumers, treat the two outcome types symmetrically: a non-execution event is a first-class record that participates in lineage chains exactly as an execution event does. This symmetry is what makes absence as auditable as presence.

Concurrency considerations arise when many consumers simultaneously evaluate the same broadcast result. Each consumer's checks are independent and can be evaluated in parallel without coordination, because each consults its own policy reference and writes to its own lineage. The producer's responsibility ends with the emission of the result and its lineage components; the producer does not arbitrate among consumers and does not learn which consumers executed and which declared non-execution unless those outcomes are explicitly returned.

Latency budgeting is straightforward. The three checks are bounded by signature verification cost and root comparison cost, both of which are independent of traversal depth. Where deep traversals must be checked end-to-end, the consumer may elect to delegate intermediate-step checking to a trusted intermediary as described above, paying the delegation contract overhead once rather than the per-step verification cost on every consumption.

Prior-Art Distinction

Existing approaches to discovery validation rely on signed payloads, schema validation, or trust scoring. Signed payloads confirm that a result was produced by a recognized producer but do not verify that the production path was admissible at each step. Schema validation confirms structural well-formedness but says nothing about governance class or anchor authorization. Trust scoring assigns a numerical reliability to a result without declaring a binary admissibility outcome, leaving consumers to set their own thresholds and producing inconsistent consumption decisions across a federation.

The disclosed mechanism is distinguished by three structural properties: each result carries explicit, separable lineage for anchor, traversal, and governance class; checks are performed by the consumer against the consumer's own declared policy rather than against producer-supplied claims; and a check failure produces a recorded non-execution event rather than a degraded consumption. These properties together make discovery a contract-bound activity rather than a best-effort exchange.

Failure Modes and Defenses

Several failure modes are anticipated and structurally defended. A producer that submits a result with falsified anchor lineage fails the consumer's anchor signature check, because the signature is bound to a governance authority key that the producer does not control. A producer that submits a result whose traversal lineage skips a step fails the consumer's traversal admissibility check, because the chain reconstruction reveals the gap. A consumer that has been induced by an adversary to widen its expectation set must alter its own policy reference to do so; that alteration is itself a signed lineage event observable in audit, so widening cannot occur silently.

A subtler failure mode is selective non-recording, in which a consumer executes on an inadmissible result and then declines to record the execution. This is defended by structural symmetry: the consumer's downstream actions, including emitted forecasts and confidence levels, themselves require lineage. A downstream action whose justifying lineage points to a non-existent execution event fails its own lineage check at the next consumer. The chain therefore propagates the inconsistency forward until it is caught, rather than absorbing it locally.

A final failure mode is mass non-execution, in which a producer drift causes most or all consumers to declare non-execution, halting useful work. This is treated not as a failure of the mechanism but as a successful detection: the mechanism is designed to halt work whose admissibility cannot be established, and the recorded non-executions provide the governance authority with the evidence needed to act on the producer drift.

Disclosure Scope

The disclosure encompasses any system in which discovery results carry separable anchor, traversal, and governance lineage components, in which consumers perform independent checks against declared policy, and in which check failure is recorded as non-execution rather than degraded consumption. The disclosure is not limited to any particular discovery mechanism, traversal algorithm, or substrate.

Variants that alter only the serialization format of lineage components or the transport mechanism for results remain within scope. Variants that omit any of the three checks, that perform checks against producer-supplied claims, or that treat check failure as a recoverable error fall outside the disclosed mechanism.