Expand description
§ccf-core
Contextual Coherence Fields — earned relational trust for autonomous systems.
Patent pending: US Provisional Application 63/988,438 (priority date 23 Feb 2026).
§This is not a behaviour system. It is a mathematical architecture.
Three primitives combine to produce emergent social behaviour without a single line of behavioural code.
Context-keyed accumulators — trust is not a single global value. Every distinct sensory environment has its own independent trust history. Bright-and-quiet is not the same as dark-and-loud, and the two histories never share state. A robot that trusts the living room starts at zero in the basement.
The minimum gate — effective coherence requires agreement between two signals: what the system has learned (accumulated context trust) and what it is experiencing right now (the instant sensor reading).
“Both must be true, or I stay reserved.”
Familiar contexts buffer noise — a single bad moment cannot erase earned trust. Unfamiliar contexts demand proof before any expressiveness is permitted.
Graph min-cut boundary — as contexts accumulate trust histories, the system builds a trust-weighted graph. Stoer-Wagner global min-cut finds the cheapest place to divide it into two clusters.
“This room feels different from that room.”
The comfort zone emerges from the topology — you do not configure a threshold.
None of these produces social behaviour alone. Together they produce shyness, warmth, protectiveness, and earned fluency — without programming any of it.
§The pipeline
Sensors → ContextKey → CoherenceField → SocialPhase → Outputs
↑ ↑ ↑
SensorVocabulary Personality PhaseSpace
↓
MinCutBoundary (comfort zone)
SinkhornKnopp (trust mixing)§Module overview
| Module | Key types | What it does |
|---|---|---|
vocabulary | [SensorVocabulary], [ContextKey] | Define your sensor space; hash + cosine similarity |
accumulator | [CoherenceAccumulator], [CoherenceField] | Per-context trust with earned floor and minimum gate |
phase | [SocialPhase], [Personality], [PhaseSpace] | Four-quadrant phase classifier with Schmitt trigger hysteresis |
boundary | [MinCutBoundary] | Stoer-Wagner comfort-zone boundary discovery |
sinkhorn | [SinkhornKnopp] | Doubly stochastic trust mixing |
mbot | mbot::MbotSensors | Reference 6-dimensional vocabulary for mBot2 ($50 hardware) |
[seg] | [seg::CcfSegSnapshot] | Serialisable field snapshot for persistence (requires serde feature) |
§Patent claim map
| Type | Patent Claims | Description |
|---|---|---|
[SensorVocabulary] | 1, 8 | Composite sensor context key trait |
[ContextKey] | 1, 8 | Discrete context identifier from quantised sensor signals |
[CoherenceAccumulator] | 2–5 | Per-context trust state with earned floor and asymmetric decay |
[CoherenceField] | 6–7, 13 | Trust field: context-keyed accumulator map with min-gate |
[SocialPhase] | 14–18 | Four-quadrant phase classifier with Schmitt trigger hysteresis |
[SinkhornKnopp] | 19–23 | Birkhoff polytope projector — doubly stochastic mixing matrix |
[MinCutBoundary] | 9–12 | Stoer-Wagner comfort-zone boundary discovery |
[Personality] | 3 (modulators) | Dynamic modulators: curiosity, startle sensitivity, recovery |
§no_std
This crate is #![no_std] by default with no heap required. Enable the std feature
for persistence helpers. Enable the serde feature for serialisation support
(required for [seg::CcfSegSnapshot] and RVF persistence).
§License
Business Source License 1.1. Free for evaluation and non-production use. Change date: 23 February 2032 — Apache License 2.0. Commercial production use requires a license from Flout Labs (cbyrne@floutlabs.com).
Modules§
- accumulator
- Per-context coherence accumulators and the full coherence field.
- boundary
- Comfort-zone boundary via global minimum cut on the trust-weighted context graph.
- mbot
- mBot2 reference sensor vocabulary.
- phase
- Social phase classification and personality modulators.
- sinkhorn
- Birkhoff polytope projector via Sinkhorn-Knopp iteration.
- vocabulary
- Generic sensor vocabulary — the platform-independent context key system.