Glossary

Glossary

Every term this wiki uses, what it means here, where it is implemented, and where the idea comes from. Further reading has the sources in full.

The room

term	what it means here	see
Desk	a group conversation with an ordered member list, declared in a blueprint and merged with operator overlays	Desks and rosters, desk/
Roster	a borrowed snapshot of the agents and people present	Desks and rosters, roster/
Lead	the first member of a desk who has not been retired	Desks and rosters
General	the default desk, which has four stored spellings and one identity	Desks and rosters, chat/
Mention	an @ span resolved against the live roster and desks into a typed target	Mentions, grammar reference, mention/
Alias	a name a mention may be written with: an agent id or display name, a person label or its ASCII slug, a desk id or name, or everyone/channel/here; matched case-insensitively, and always resolved to the record's canonical id	Mentions, grammar reference
Desk sigil	@#name, which restricts a mention's lookup to desks so a person or agent of the same name cannot shadow it	Mentions
Quiet mention	a mention left visible in the text but not acted on, usually because its target is stale, a repeat of a target already pinged, or past MENTION_CAP	Mentions
Fail closed	the rule both grammars share: an unknown, ambiguous or malformed token resolves to nothing rather than to an error or a guess	grammar reference
Projection	the fold from a shared multi-speaker transcript into one viewer's history	Transcript projection, session/
Attribution	carrying the author and their label on every projected message, so an agent never reads a peer's words as its own	Transcript projection
Watermark	the caller-owned sequence marking what an agent has already been shown	Transcript projection, watermark
Thread index	a bounded, recency-ordered view of a desk's live threads	Threads, threads/
Responder ladder	the deterministic rungs by which one message finds exactly one agent	Responder ladder, responder/
Hop limit	the host-supplied, finite bound on how far a chain of mention-dispatched or referred turns may run	Responder ladder
Referral	at most one child turn that may run on a desk other than the one that triggered it	Cross-desk referral, referral/
Return	the one answer a referred turn carries back to the conversation that asked	Cross-desk referral
Correlation boundary	what a desk is: its members share a transcript, so they share their errors, and averaging inside it cannot cancel them	Cross-desk referral, Benchmarks

The mechanics

term	what it means here	where it comes from
Stigmergy	coordination through traces in a shared medium, never through messages between agents; the transcript is the medium	Stigmergy, Grassé 1959 · Trace grammar
Trace	one typed deposit read out of a marker line: propose, support, object, refute, evidence, question, commit, or defer	Trace grammar, grammar reference, trace/
Marker	the line-leading !kind that deposits a trace; recognised only at the start of a line and outside a fenced block	Trace grammar
Topic	a proposal identity that support and objection attach to, written #name; an opaque verbatim string, so two spellings are two topics	Trace grammar
Citation	^N, a sequence named as grounds; may repeat, recorded once each in authored order, and read wherever it appears after the kind	Trace grammar
Target	>N, the message an objection is aimed at; an objection naming none parses and silences nobody	Trace grammar
Grounded	support that cites a message; ungrounded support joins neither the supporter set nor the weight	Hive episodes
Evidentially grounded	support whose citation chain reaches a stated fact rather than another opinion; optional, and off by default	Information cascade · Benchmarks
Salience	a trace's pull on the room's attention: decaying recency, plus importance, plus caller-supplied relevance	Generative Agents · salience/
Decay	the exponential half-life on recency, without which the first speaker holds the floor forever	Exponential decay, pheromone
Quorum	the number of distinct grounded supporters inside a window that makes a topic carry	Quorum sensing, honeybee swarms · Episode policy
Window	how many sequences back support still counts	Episode policy
Standing	where one topic stands: its supporters, its silenced advocates, its refuters, and its weight	quorum/
Cross-inhibition	an objection that silences the advocate of a message rather than debiting the option	honeybee stop signals, lateral inhibition · Hive episodes
Refutation	a cited fact argued against a topic rather than against a person; caps the topic once enough distinct members deposit one, and is off by default	Trace grammar, Benchmarks
Hidden profile	a task whose answer needs facts no single member holds, so a group that discusses only what everyone already knows chooses worse than its pooled information supports	Stasser & Titus 1985 · Further reading
Transactive memory	the group's directory of who knows what, as distinct from what anybody knows	Wegner 1986 · Transactive memory
Directory	one weight per (agent, topic), folded fresh from the transcript on every step and never stored; off by default	Transactive memory, directory/
Specialisation	the decayed weight of a member's own grounded deposits on a topic — what it claims about itself	Lewis 2003 · Transactive memory
Credibility	the decayed weight of other members' citations of those deposits, less their objections; self-citation earns nothing	Lewis 2003 · Transactive memory
Diffuse cue	a role label or host-supplied affinity, as against a specific cue earned from observed contributions; the directory treats the first as a prior	Hollingshead 2000 · Transactive memory
Deferral	!defer #topic: an abstention that zeroes its author's directory weight on a topic and promotes it as contested	Trace grammar, tremble dance
Contested topic	what the bid routes on: the most recent live deferral's topic, or the uncarried standing with the most support	Hive episodes
Directory circularity	the hazard that who spoke becomes who is thought to know; reported as the rank correlation between directory weight and speech share	Information cascade · Transactive memory
Attention market	every eligible member bids, and the highest bid takes the floor	Pandemonium, arg max
Response threshold	the private bar a member's urge must clear before it bids at all	task allocation in social insects
Dominance cap	the share of grounded, surviving contributions above which a member is damped	collective intelligence factor
Repetition cap	the number of distinct supporters after which restating a topic scores nothing	Why multi-agent systems fail
Blind round	an opening round in which peer messages are hidden, so first positions form independently	Information cascade · Episode policy
Episode	one bounded deliberation, from the opening watermark to a named termination	Hive episodes, episode/
Phase	Deliberate or Commit; the transition is one way	Hive episodes
Converged	one topic carried and the room recorded it	Hive episodes
Deadlocked	two or more topics carried and nobody can break the tie	Deadlock · Episode policy
Exhausted	the turn budget ran out before anything carried	Episode policy
Idle	nobody's urge cleared their threshold	Hive episodes

The benchmark

term	what it means here	see
Arm	one policy being scored: ladder, vote, hive, or hive+	Benchmarks
Matched-budget control	vote, given the whole turn budget, deciding by plurality with nobody seeing anybody	self-consistency, plurality
Decided %	the share of rooms that terminated with a topic carried	Benchmarks
Correct %	the share of all rooms, undecided ones included, that landed on the genuinely best option	Benchmarks
ns/step	one call to step over a live transcript, with participant time excluded	Benchmarks
Live mode	the same harness driving real agent CLIs, one process per authorized turn	Benchmarks: live rooms
Federation	several desks deciding one question, each with a blind spot of its own, reachable only by referral	Benchmarks
Stranded answer	a referred answer that arrives after the desk that asked has already decided	Cross-desk referral

The boundaries

term	what it means here	see
Port	a trait the host implements: SessionLog, Selector, MentionTurnQueue, or ReferralQueue	Host integration
Fold	a pure reduction over arguments the caller already holds; every decision here is one	fold, pure function
Purity guard	assert-pure.sh, which fails CI if a pure crate takes on a runtime, transport, or framework	Development
Pointer bump	the release mechanism: a consumer moves its submodule to a newer commit	Host integration