The whole project in five sentences. Delta Atlas is a collection of deterministic, browser-side tools and recorded data snapshots for examining stated structure in AI plans, traces, frameworks, and terminology. Each tool applies explicit rules to supplied text; it does not understand meaning, observe the outside world, or authorize action. With the same pinned engine, snapshot, and input, tested behavior is reproducible within the stated scope, but different public pages still contain different snapshots. User text is processed locally by these tools and is not sent to an AI model or application API; Cloudflare may separately receive ordinary request metadata and page-performance or visit measurements (opens in a new tab). A human remains responsible for interpreting every flag, checking primary sources, and deciding what happens next.
Public tools and their bounded roles
Start herea two-minute orientation to common AI terms.
Ask (home search)a deterministic lookup over a 435-term embedded snapshot. It can return recorded source labels, but those labels are not complete per-term source receipts.
Explorebrowses and filters the same 435-term public snapshot. The candidate source inventory contains 439 records; the data-sync baseline records the four missing IDs and status differences.
Quick checkcompares a short goal with its stated parts. It is a structural prompt, not a correctness or safety judgment.
Gap Checkapplies fixed phrase and structure rules to a plan or policy. The current embedded snapshot has 433 terms; a flag points to text for human review.
Framework Auditchecks whether stated framework parts are actionable and testable. Its score is a heuristic over text, not enforcement or certification.
Priority Tracerflags recorded language associated with a goal outranking a stated rule, and marks language associated with the rule holding. Its labeled fixtures bound what has been tested.
Continuity Auditchecks an operations document for named risks without stated controls and single points of failure without documented backup.
The Cadence Dialan interactive analogy grounded in specific quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno experiments. Applying that shape to software or human monitoring is a design hypothesis, not a transferred physical law.
The Basinan interactive dynamical-systems analogy separating return speed from disturbance tolerance. Early-warning signals are conditional indicators, not universal diagnoses.
Primitives · Field · Curationa separate 160-record primitives library, an experimental visualization, and a curation view built from an older vocabulary snapshot.
Ledger terms: archival source and current usage
| Function | Bounded meaning |
|---|---|
| Absorb load (alias: Buffer) | Takes survivable error and deforms without ending the system. It is not a claim that every load is survivable. |
| Check against a fixed reference (alias: Floor) | Compares a claim with a reference it did not generate and cannot edit during the check. This does not make the reference correct or independent by itself. |
| Reset to baseline (alias: Return) | Records a recovery and stops a changed state from silently becoming the baseline. This is the exact v0.5 name; “Return” is its stated alias. |
The archival v0.4 PDF (opens in a new tab) and v0.5 PDF (opens in a new tab) remain unchanged. v0.5 labels itself rolling, unsealed, and candidate; visual and text review confirms the names above. Both PDFs have known pagination defects where repeated table headers or continued rows crowd the page header; this guide does not hide or repair those archival bytes. No v0.6 or “Witness Ledger” artifact is present in this repository, so this page makes no claim that one exists or is scheduled.
Three drift labels used by the project
| Label | How this project uses it |
|---|---|
| Content drift | A recorded claim departs from its declared reference. |
| Thermal drift | The evaluator degrades under sustained load. The site currently offers no direct physiological or cognitive measurement of this condition. |
| Ordering drift | A stated purpose is treated as outranking a stated constraint. The Tracer checks text patterns associated with this condition; it does not observe hidden priorities. |
Evidence status and witness boundaries
| Layer | Supported claim and ceiling |
|---|---|
| Self / one artifact | Can expose internal gaps or contradictions under fixed rules. A coherent falsehood can pass. |
| Cross-artifact | Can compare independently identified bytes, manifests, or receipts. Independence must be established; two files do not become independent merely because both exist. |
| Different substrate | Can add an observation from a different measurement channel. The repository's power experiment is explicitly experimental and does not prove tamper resistance. |
Current vocabulary boundary. The candidate source file contains 439 records and labels all 439 “reviewed.” That label is not receipt-grade review evidence: reviewer identity, review date, exact locator, and digest are not consistently recorded per term. Ask, Explore, and Curation embed 435 records; Gap Check embeds 433. Until an owner accepts a materialization policy, this page reports both states and treats neither difference as silently resolved.
Scripts and governance surfaces
Corpus harnessesreplay labeled fixtures and reject known mutations. Passing proves only the specified cases for the checked bytes.
CLI toolsrun selected checks in a pipeline and return findings, JSON, and exit codes. An exit code is an operational result, not a truth certificate.
Append-only governance
governance/ledger/events records decisions and evidence hashes; governance/ledger/checkpoints seals counted prefixes. Local hashing detects byte changes; without an external witness it does not prevent authorized history replacement.Historical register
proposals.json and older calibration notes remain historical project artifacts. They are not the current acceptance authority.The seamscorrections are appended and left inspectable— but publication, a hash, or a passing harness does not make a claim semantically true.
Primary sources behind the two analogies
The Cadence Dial and Basin pages apply these sources as explicitly bounded analogies. Primary-source DOI links below open in a new tab.
- Misra and Sudarshan, “The Zeno's Paradox in Quantum Theory” (1977), DOI 10.1063/1.523304.
- Itano et al., “Quantum Zeno Effect” (1990), DOI 10.1103/PhysRevA.41.2295.
- Kofman and Kurizki, “Acceleration of quantum decay processes by frequent observations” (2000), DOI 10.1038/35014537.
- Fischer, Gutiérrez-Medina, and Raizen, “Observation of the Quantum Zeno and Anti-Zeno Effects in an Unstable System” (2001), DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.040402.
- Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems” (1973), DOI 10.1146/annurev.es.04.110173.000245.
- Pimm, “The complexity and stability of ecosystems” (1984), DOI 10.1038/307321a0.
- Scheffer et al., “Early-warning signals for critical transitions” (2009), DOI 10.1038/nature08227.
Claim ceiling. These sources establish results in their stated physical, experimental, ecological, or modeled domains. Delta Atlas uses them to motivate questions about observation, recovery, and disturbance. They do not prove that a particular monitoring schedule, “basin,” or warning signal transfers unchanged to AI systems, organizations, or people.
This page's dated change record
| Date | Change | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-02 | Initial plain-English project legend. | Created an accessible front door to the tools and project terms. |
| 2026-07-10 | Added tool, witness-ladder, and analogy summaries. | Expanded the map as new public pages appeared. |
| 2026-08-13 | Corrected privacy, reproducibility, snapshot, terminology, citation, and governance claims; added accessible structure and an explicit source list. | Repository and production audits found that the July page overclaimed currentness, network isolation, uniform data, physical transfer, and evidence strength. The archival PDFs remain unchanged. |