AES — Authority Evolution Simulator

AES (Authority Evolution Simulator) is a research simulator for studying how authority evolves over time in capability-based systems.

Rather than modeling a concrete operating system or kernel, AES treats authority as a temporal graph and focuses on long-term dynamics such as revocation, provenance, epistemic limits, persistence, and collapse. The simulator is designed to support controlled, reproducible experiments that expose structural limits of authority management in long-lived systems.

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What AES is (and is not)

AES is:

• a research simulator
• a temporal model of authority and delegation
• a tool for empirical studies accompanying academic publications

AES is not:

• an operating system or microkernel
• a kernel emulator
• a security product
• a performance benchmark

The goal is explanatory power, not deployment.

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Core design invariants

AES is built around a small number of non-negotiable invariants:

• All authority changes occur via explicit events
• Authority state is fully reconstructible from history
• Simulation runs are deterministic given a seed
• Metrics are pure functions over history or snapshots
• There is a strict separation between ground truth and observation

These invariants are established in Phase 0 and preserved throughout all later phases.

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Research structure

Development is organized into Phases 0–6. Phases are cumulative: each phase weakens an assumption made by earlier ones.

Phase	Focus
Phase 0	Core simulator infrastructure and invariants
Phase 1	Revocation semantics under full knowledge
Phase 2	Failure of static authority models
Phase 3	Epistemic limits of authority reasoning
Phase 4	Revocation horizons and historical limits
Phase 5	Memory, persistence, and authority residue
Phase 6	Predicting authority collapse

Phases are tracked as milestones in the issue tracker.
Tasks within a phase are tracked as issues, with checklist items corresponding to individual commits.

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Repository structure

The repository is organized by responsibility, not by phase:

cli/        Command-line tools
core/       Core data structures and invariants
docs/       Specifications and phase documentation
io/         Event logs, replay, and serialization
metrics/    Measurement and analysis code
sim/        Simulation engine and execution logic
tests/      Determinism, invariants, and correctness tests
tools/      Auxiliary scripts and helpers
workload/   Workload and stress-test generators

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Workflow overview

• Milestones represent Phases (0–6)
• Issues represent approximately one-day Tasks
• Issue checklists represent Steps (≈ one commit)
• Labels describe semantics (e.g. revocation, metrics, epistemic)
• A single Kanban board is used for daily execution only

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Reproducibility

AES is designed so that:

• identical seeds produce identical event traces,
• all results can be regenerated from raw logs,
• figures and tables are derived from scripts, not manual steps.

Reproducibility is treated as a research requirement, not an afterthought.

Workload-Family Experiments

AES sweep mode now emits one row per run in experiment_runs.csv in addition to existing sweep artifacts. This enables workload-family reporting over (strategy, depth, fan_out, seed) instead of single-graph snapshots.

Default Phase 1 workload-family matrix and analysis scripts:

• config: tools/figures/phase1/sweep_workload_family_default.json
• run + validate + aggregate + plots: tools/regen-workload-family.sh
• summary table output: results/summary/by_strategy_depth_fanout.csv

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License

AES is released under the MIT License.

See LICENSE for details.

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Status

This repository is under active research-driven development.
Interfaces may evolve between phases, but core invariants are preserved deliberately.

If you are reading this as part of an academic artifact evaluation:
the recommended entry point is Phase 0 documentation in docs/.

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Citation

A formal citation will be added once the first associated publication is available.