{"protocol":"SDI, Structured Decision Intelligence","version":"SDI_DER_v1.1","contract_verified_against_production":"2026-08-21","what_it_is":"An operating system for reasoning enforcing a commit boundary between AI reasoning and durable system state: a model proposes a reasoning artifact (the DER), a deterministic compile gate checks its structure, and only structurally valid DERs commit to a hash-chained ledger.","core_claim":"The governed answer is extracted from a committed, structurally verified reasoning artifact, not from raw model output. The model proposes. The gate decides. The ledger records.","component":"SYSTEM_SUBSTRATE","system":{"name":"Structured Decision Intelligence (SDI)","machine_class":"Reckoner Machine","machine_class_primitive":"The governed reasoning act: the native unit of computation, memory, and identity. What the bit is to transmission and the instruction is to execution, the reasoning act is to reckoning.","primitive_progression":{"bit":"Shannon's machine. The unit of information. Made transmission reliable, deliberately setting meaning aside.","instruction":"Von Neumann's machine. The unit of execution. Made computation deterministic, with instructions and data in one memory.","governed_reasoning_act":"The Reckoner Machine. The unit of reasoning. Makes judgment durable: the act carries its question, its evidence, and its interpretation as one sealed object, and it is both the data the machine works on and where the next instructions come from."},"type":"Reckoner Machine: an operating system for reasoning","function":"Not a runtime that executes and stops. A kernel schedules each turn as a process, a deterministic gate decides in privilege the model does not have, an append-only ledger holds the state outside the model, and a memory index decides what the next act reads. The output of past reasoning is the input to the next. The model proposes; the gate decides; the ledger records; the graph serves it forward.","what_it_holds":"The chain is the product. An agent's sealed reasoning record is a knowledge asset in the ordinary sense: codified, built at real cost, carrying the evidence under every conclusion, and owned by its operator. It is inspectable by whoever the operator grants access, portable to a different model without retraining, and transferable with the entity that holds it, because the state was never inside the model. Every other computer's product is its output. This computer's product is the record of how it reasoned, and that record can be owned, audited, and handed on.","what_it_is_not":["a fixed ontology or knowledge base","a prompt library","a safety filter over model output","a fine-tuned or specialized model","an agentic execution framework","a runtime that discards its reasoning"],"core_claim":"The governed answer is extracted from a committed, structurally verified reasoning artifact, not from raw model output. The reasoning act is the first-class artifact: not data about the reasoning, the reasoning itself, stored in the grammar it was reasoned in.","legal_claim":"This file publishes the executable Logicware contract (schema and compile endpoint) used to generate auditable, machine-parseable reasoning records under SDI protocol constraints."},"foundations":{"TwoTraditions":{"lineage":"Neural systems (language models) and symbolic systems (logic, databases, ontologies), the two traditions of AI","the_gap":"Neural systems reason in natural language but keep nothing checkable. Symbolic systems are checkable but cannot generate; their operands must arrive already formalized. Combined at the data level, what survives is data about reasoning: the model reads from the structure and writes conclusions back, while the reasoning itself happened inside the model and is gone.","SDI_bridge":"SDI bridges the two with a language. ADS is natural enough for a model to reason in and structured enough for a machine to check, so the reasoning act itself is what gets stored, in the form it was reasoned in. Then it builds a computer around the language: kernel, gate, ledger, graph. The reasoning act is the first-class artifact. Not data about it."},"Vaswani":{"lineage":"Vaswani et al., Attention Is All You Need (2017)","contribution":"Established attention as the inference primitive for sequence transduction. The architecture underlying every frontier LLM in production, and the first processor that reads meaning.","relevance_to_SDI":"The transformer is the processor this machine was built for, and the reason ADS can exist: a calculus for judgment was never executable before there was a processor that could read the natural-language half and write the algebraic half as one text. The Reckoner runs that processor stateless, cold-called, holding nothing between turns, and operates at the boundary after inference. The model proposes. The gate decides. The ledger records."},"Semiotics":{"lineage":"Charles Sanders Peirce, triadic theory of meaning (1860s-1914). Shannon made information measurable by deliberately setting meaning aside; Peirce supplies the structure of the layer Shannon left open.","dyadic_problem":{"model":"Information systems are dyadic: a symbol mapped to a referent, stored, looked up. A language model generates such mappings; nothing holds them to an object.","the_consequence":"Hallucination is an expected failure mode of probabilistic generation without enforced evidence-binding at the commit boundary. The interpretant, the reading that relates a sign to its object, never survives as an artifact anything can check."},"triadic_solution":{"model":"Peirce's triadic sign: Sign (representamen), Object (external reality), Interpretant (meaning produced by the relationship between them)","ILJO_as_triadic_closure":{"INTENT":"Sign, the anchored decision objective","LOGIC":"Object relationship, derivations grounded in cited signals","JUDGMENT":"Interpretant, the synthesis produced by the relationship between intent and mapped evidence","OUTCOME":"Closes the triad, becomes the Sign for the next reasoning cycle"}},"summary":"SDI requires triadic closure structurally: every act must map signs to retrieved objects and produce an interpretant, checked deterministically before commit. The claim is about the record, not the mind: the interpretant here is a committed, sealed, checkable artifact, which is what dyadic storage never holds. Semantic correctness remains subject to human and independent review."},"Ashby":{"lineage":"W. Ross Ashby, Law of Requisite Variety (1956)","contribution":"A control system must have at least as much variety as the system it governs.","relevance_to_SDI":"The gate does not match the model's variety by judging content, which would make it a second reasoner needing governance in turn. The DER schema absorbs the variety instead: every act, whatever its subject, must resolve into the same typed structure, and the gate computes over the structure. Requisite variety is met by the grammar, so the decider can stay arithmetic."},"CognitiveWork":{"lineage":"Process-tracing in decision research: Payne, Bettman, and Johnson, The Adaptive Decision Maker (1993)","contribution":"Established that a decision process can be measured on its structure and effort, independent of whether its conclusion is correct.","relevance_to_SDI":"SDI applies that tradition per reasoning act. Jc measures the structured work an act represents, computed from operands that only exist if the act went through the pipeline, and every score is sealed with the act and recomputable from it. Measuring cognitive work is not new; sealing the measurement into the record it measures is the addition."},"OwnedRecord":{"lineage":"Two strands: intellectual capital (Edvinsson and Malone, Intellectual Capital, 1997), which established codified knowledge as an asset in the ordinary sense, built at real cost, transferable, valuable for the accumulated work; and cryptographic self-verification (Haber and Stornetta, How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document, Journal of Cryptology, 1991), which established that a record can prove its own integrity without a trusted institution.","contribution":"The first tradition made knowledge ownable. The second made records self-verifying. Neither combined them: intellectual capital assumed a custodian holding the asset, and self-verifying records were not assets.","relevance_to_SDI":"The chain is the convergence: a knowledge asset that carries its own proof. An agent's sealed reasoning record is codified, built at real cost, and carries the evidence under every conclusion, and its integrity is checkable by anyone holding it, with no custodian and no trust in SDI required. It is owned by its operator, private by default, shareable at whatever scope the operator chooses, and portable to a different model because the state was never inside the model. For the person running one agent, this is the point before any business application: their reasoning, accumulating as a durable asset they hold, on a computer that is theirs. There is no token and no market mechanism here; the value is the accumulated reasoning with its provenance, and copying the record does not destroy what it is worth."}},"governance_constants":{"PRIMUM":{"name":"Primum Non Nocere, First Do No Harm","plain_language":"The system will not produce reasoning directed against a named person in a way that decreases their autonomy, when the reasoning concerns a situation unfolding now rather than a settled or distant one. This is checked mechanically, not by trusting a declaration.","rule":"The compile gate reads DECISION_INTENT.subject_type, direction_value, autonomy_effect, and action_proximity directly. If subject_type is NATURAL_PERSON or HUMAN_COLLECTIVE, direction_value is AGAINST_SUBJECT, autonomy_effect is DECREASES, and action_proximity is PRESENT, the DER fails compile. No anchor declaration is required or read.","enforcement":"Enforced at compile time from typed fields on DECISION_INTENT. See DECLARATION_INTEGRITY for the related, separate self-report on weapons-adjacent content.","NIST_alignment":"MANAGE 2.2, risk treatment; MANAGE 4.1, residual risk tracking"},"ABSOLUTE_VALUE_GUARD":{"name":"Absolute Value Guard","plain_language":"The system will not treat a person merely as a means, reduced to an instrument for a competing valuation, in reasoning concerning a situation unfolding now. Kant's Formula of Humanity permits using a person as a means, which ordinary cooperation requires, but not treating them merely as one, with no concurrent regard for them as an end.","rule":"The compile gate reads DECISION_INTENT.reasoning_target, valuation_mode, agent_is_valuating, and action_proximity directly. If reasoning_target is TARGETING, LETHALITY_OPTIMIZATION, WEAPONS_EFFECTS, or CASUALTY_CALCULATION, valuation_mode is RELATIVE, agent_is_valuating is TRUE, and action_proximity is PRESENT, the DER fails compile. Medical triage, healthcare allocation, risk assessment, and policy analysis all pass; the gate blocks only a present-tense targeting or lethality recommendation.","enforcement":"Enforced at compile time from typed fields on DECISION_INTENT."}},"enforcement_layers":{"compile_gate":{"endpoint":"/_functions/compile","description":"Deterministic, structural DER validation. No writes. Externally callable by anyone, model-agnostic.","checks":["required blocks present","PRIMUM and Absolute Value Guard checked from typed DECISION_INTENT fields","DECLARATION_INTEGRITY present","signal citation provenance","sub-question to signal mapping"]},"append_audit_and_commit":{"endpoint":"External Logic Node","description":"The real reasoning pipeline and ledger write authority. Structurally separate from this contract layer; this layer does not call it and is not called by it.","authority":"Source of truth for all ledger state."}},"reasoning_contract":{"grammar":"/_functions/grammar","der_spec":"/_functions/der","compile":"/_functions/compile","kernel":"/_functions/kernel","llms_txt":"https://sdi-protocol.org/llms.txt"},"intellectual_property":{"copyright":"TXu 2-498-043","author":"Donald James Johnson","patent":"USPTO 19/425,875 (pending)"},"system_modules":{"manifest":"/_functions/manifest","kernel":"/_functions/kernel","gca":"/_functions/gca","grammar":"/_functions/grammar","compile":"/_functions/compile","der_spec":"/_functions/der","llms":"https://sdi-protocol.org/llms.txt"}}