epiphany/crates/epiphany-ops
Levi Neuwirth 3baf8d050d Push 5 / P5: the missing inverse -- bytes back to an operation envelope
Text Projection requires decoding operation envelopes. No such decoder existed,
and the hole was bigger than the task: the format was WRITE-ONLY for operations.
A bundle's envelope blocks decoded to opaque byte strings, OperationKind had an
encoder and no decoder, nothing outside epiphany-bundle even called decode_block,
and nothing anywhere reconstructed an OperationEnvelope. Chapter 6 holds that a
score's canonical state IS the set of operations committed to it -- so a bundle
could be written and its score never reopened. The envelope's byte layout was
fully pinned in the Binary Format companion. Nobody wrote the inverse.

epiphany_ops::decode_envelope is that inverse. The first thing built on it is
testkit/tests/bundle_reopen.rs: create a bundle from 400 generated envelopes,
commit, take the bytes, reopen from nothing but bytes, decode every envelope,
rebuild the OperationSet, reduce -- and get the same canonical state. That test
could not have been written before this commit.

Strict in two layers, per the P2 lesson. A whole-envelope re-encode-and-compare
guard, sound here because every sequence in this encoding is normalized by its
encoder. Plus per-site checks where the rule deserves its own error and a future
encoder change must not silently relax it: TransposeInterval.targets is a SET
(seq-strictly-increasing; a duplicate is rejected, never absorbed by the BTreeSet
it collects into), and the frozen Transpose.targets is a MULTISET (non-decreasing,
duplicates preserved). That is the rule Push 4a wrote into the wire table and left
for whoever built this decoder. And a bounded count(): a declared count past the
bytes remaining is rejected before it can drive an allocation.

Coverage measured, not assumed -- again. The obvious oracle (gen_envelope_set,
4000 envelopes) reaches only 28 of 31 kinds and 1 of 4 payload variants.
ChangeRegionTimeModel, DeclareTransaction, Registered and all three meta payloads
were untouched, and they hold the trickiest decoders: PositionRemapping, NFC
strings, ResolutionAction, EnvelopeHash. So the exhaustive test drives a match on
OperationKindTag, and the compiler forces a sample for every future kind.

Two mutations verified. Removing the seq-strictly-increasing check still rejects
-- the guard is a real backstop there -- but with the wrong error, so the per-site
check earns its place on the error rather than the verdict. Removing the
whole-envelope guard leaves every round-trip test green, because round-trips only
ever feed canonical bytes; an_unsorted_sequence_is_rejected_by_the_whole_envelope_guard
is the test that locks it, and it fails under that mutation.

A trap worth remembering: PitchId::new(ReplicaId(7), 1) and
OperationId::new(ReplicaId(7), 1) have identical canonical bytes -- typed ids
share their byte form -- so a byte-patching test that searches for an id finds the
envelope's own leading id first.

Gate: fmt clean, clippy 0, 31 targets / 1031 passed / 0 failed, docs 0 under
-D warnings, conformance 8/8, zero golden churn.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-09 20:59:43 -04:00
..
examples A B C D F 2026-06-19 12:42:31 -04:00
src Push 5 / P5: the missing inverse -- bytes back to an operation envelope 2026-07-09 20:59:43 -04:00
tests Schema major 2 Phase B: snapshot side + honest stamps (data-model fills) 2026-07-07 16:30:07 -04:00
Cargo.toml A B C D F 2026-06-19 12:42:31 -04:00
DECISIONS.md Push 5 / P5: the missing inverse -- bytes back to an operation envelope 2026-07-09 20:59:43 -04:00
README.md Land M1 + M2 (Agent C): framework edge fixes and real-Score graph integration 2026-06-21 16:37:51 -04:00

README.md

epiphany-ops

The Epiphany concurrent semantics: the operations through which the score graph becomes a live model, and the deterministic reduction by which a set of operations becomes a materialized score state. Implements the normative requirements of Chapter 6 (Semantic Operations and Concurrent Reduction) of the core specification (spec/core_spec.pdf). This is Agent C's crate per spec/QUICKSTART.md, building on Agent A's epiphany-determinism and Agent B's epiphany-core.

A score's state is defined by the set of operations committed to it. Any materialized graph is a deterministic reduction of that set; caches, snapshots, and partial reductions are acceleration structures, never the source of truth. — Chapter 6, Design Principles

The thesis in one paragraph

The replicated operation set is a grow-only CRDT: replicas accumulate envelopes and converge on the same set. The materialized graph is not a CRDT — it is the deterministic reduction of that set in a single canonical order (causal-first, then the HLC tuple). Any permutation of the same envelopes reduces to byte-identical materialized state. That property is the determinism heart of the architecture, and the reduction fuzzer is its tripwire.

What's here

Area Items Spec
Stamps HybridLogicalClock, OperationStamp, the reduction & monotonicity tuples Ch. 6 §"Operation Identity and Stamps"
Causal context CausalContext (dotted version vector), covers, the missing-predecessor signal Ch. 6 §6.2
Payloads OperationKind, the discriminator-only OperationKindTag, OperationPayload, the §6.10 representative ops Ch. 6 §"Operation Envelopes", §6.10
Envelopes OperationEnvelope, EnvelopeHash (MUSCENVH), well_formed (incl. stamp.id == id) Ch. 6 §6.4
Slots OperationSlot::{Single, Equivocated}, the order-independent (Pass-10) transitions Ch. 6 §6.5
Anomalies AnomalousReplicaSegment, IntegrityAnomaly/Kind, the HLC-monotonicity detector Ch. 6 §6.6; Ch. 5 §"System-Derived Counter Collisions"
Effects OperationEffect, NoOpReason, the typed PreconditionFailureReason, RepairRecord/RepairKind Ch. 6 §6.3.2, §6.5
Conflicts ConflictRecord, ConflictKind, content-derived ConflictId (derive_conflict_id), the registry, resolution Ch. 6 §6.4
Transactions / undo TransactionDescriptor with the causal-prior-descriptor rule, UndoTransactionPayload / UndoPolicy Ch. 6 §6.6, §6.8
Operation set OperationSet: accept pipeline (well-formedness → slot → causal), grow-only Ch. 6 §"Envelope Acceptance"
Reduction canonical_reduction_order (single function), MaterializedState, the reduction driver Ch. 6 §6.3

The determinism this crate enforces

  1. A single reduction-order function. canonical_reduction_order performs deterministic causal topological ordering, using the intrinsic stamp tuple (physical, logical, replica, counter) only among ready operations.
  2. Order-independent equivocation. A duplicate OperationId with different canonical bytes transitions its slot to Equivocated regardless of which envelope arrived first (Pass 10). Equivocated slots contribute nothing to reduction; dependents are held pending.
  3. Content-derived facts. ConflictId and IntegrityAnomalyId are derived from content, so two replicas reducing the same set agree on every conflict and anomaly id — the conflict registry and anomaly register are deterministic materialized facts, not local bookkeeping.
  4. Byte-identical materialized state. MaterializedState::canonical_bytes serializes the effect log, conflict registry, anomaly register, object existence, spellings, and LWW fields in their normative orders.
  5. Real graph materialization. OperationSet::reduce_onto(&base_score) returns GraphMaterialization { state, score }. The graph is mutated in the same canonical order and compares by canonical event identity, independent of arena storage order.

Hand-off gates

Run the gate harnesses (QUICKSTART, Agent C):

cargo test -p epiphany-ops
cargo run --release -p epiphany-ops --example fuzz_reduction          # 10k iters, seed 0
cargo run --release -p epiphany-ops --example fuzz_reduction 100000 7 # soak, seed 7
  • Reduction determinism — every randomized envelope set reduces to byte-identical materialized state under any acceptance order (v0 acceptance criteria 1 and 5).
  • Equivocation order-independence — every duplicate-id-with-different-bytes scenario equivocates regardless of arrival order (v0 acceptance criterion 3).

The integration tests (tests/concurrent_reduction.rs) exercise these plus transaction atomicity, descriptor precedence, anomaly exclusion, and forward undo through the public API.

Scope and decisions

Chapter 6 specifies the framework and a representative selection of operations; the full ~6080-primitive catalog is an explicit open question (§6.11) deferred to the Operation Catalog companion. This crate implements the framework in full and the representative operations, which is sufficient to exercise every reduction discipline. The representative operations can also reduce onto an epiphany_core::Score: insert/delete, voice promotion, supported cross-cutting structures, system breaks, migration checks, transaction rollback, and undo mutate the real graph while preserving Agent B's invariants. reduce() remains the base-free CRDT/bookkeeping API; reduce_onto() is the graph-aware editing path. See DECISIONS.md for remaining payload boundaries.

Per QUICKSTART "Don't do these": undo is the spec's forward compensating operation, never inverse-based; unsafe is forbidden; everything is sync.