Compositional Intelligence Dynamics
Compositional Intelligence Dynamics: Why Interaction Structures Scale While Density Plateaus
Executive Summary
Measurement anchors capability. Contract-bound arcs stay reliable only when every decision is tied to fresh measurements and sufficient statistics instead of fuzzy pattern matches.
Reusable arcs beat monoliths. Quantized arcs with explicit entry and exit contracts transfer across cohorts and domains far better than ever-larger general-purpose agents.
Cohort-aware orchestration protects safety. Ledgering arc performance by cohort keeps high-risk deployments inside validated bounds while highlighting where exploration is still required.
Macro-design loops compound. Continuous measurement, replay, blueprint refinement, and promotion pipelines deliver sustainable improvement without runaway energy costs.
How to Use This Paper
Read the abstract and glossary to ground yourself in the shared vocabulary, then dip into later sections as reference material. Implementation guidance lives in the product docs; this piece explains why the architecture is built around measurement-first composition.
Abstract
Intelligence is a pattern-exploiting search dynamic. Generalized intelligence layers compressed, noisy knowledge onto a universal cognitive core: it spots a familiar surface pattern, takes a maximal-likelihood step, and hopes the approximation lands inside the domain's acceptance region. That strategy works when errors are cheap. In high-risk regimes the decisive patterns are sparse and counterintuitive, so the fuzzy match fires the wrong quantized arc and destabilizes the rollout. Robust capability therefore requires more than clever interpolation; it requires anchoring every decision to the measured state of the object being optimized. The glossary that follows names the arc, blueprint, and cohort vocabulary so first-time readers stay oriented.
A practical recipe follows:
Measure deeply. Instrument the optimization target and retain the raw traces.
Synthesize sufficient statistics. Use dimensional blueprints to transform those measurements into the state variables the system actually reasons over.
Run contract-bound arcs. Quantized arcs execute only when entry predicates match the measured state and exit guarantees stay inside audited tolerances.
Continuously audit. Episodes feed cohort-specific ledgers; when gaps appear we rewrite the blueprint, replay the raw logs, and refresh every contract.
Monolithic reinforcement learning with long horizons and scalar rewards collapses under high risk. Composition anchored on measurement, arc contracts, and replay-backed audits scales safely instead.
Much of today's industry still assumes that scaling generality—longer chains of reasoning, denser models, broader data—will deliver domain sufficiency automatically. That intuition fails once trajectories are long, admissible sets are narrow, or mistakes carry real consequence. In those regimes only systems that track a concrete optimization object through a living blueprint, and that gate every arc on that object's measured state, remain viable. The remainder of this paper details that compositional, causally grounded path.
Glossary
Arc contracts: The paired entry predicates and exit guarantees that guard each quantized arc, including variance bounds and measurement-backed justification for when the arc can run safely.
Arc-cohort ledger: Cohort-indexed record of effect signatures, sample counts, and causal justifications for every arc, kept current so orchestration knows which transitions remain validated.
Backfill: Process of replaying raw observational traces under an updated dimensional blueprint to regenerate statistics and confirm that causal contracts still hold.
Cohort: Compact region of the sufficient-statistic space whose members share a causal response profile, enabling cohort-specific validation of arcs.
Dimensional blueprint: Specification that determines which raw patient or asset signals to extract, how to bucket them, and how to interpret them to produce the sufficient statistics that support reasoning arcs.
Distributed exploration: Search regime where local workers branch through scenario variants while a global orchestrator allocates coverage, balancing unbiased domain sweeps with biased probes of likely failure modes.
Entropy stratification: Risk-aware policy design that lowers action entropy in high-stakes regimes and permits higher entropy during low-risk exploration to sustain information gain.
Structural equivalence class: Family of quantized arcs that impose the same guardrails and effect signatures on the optimization object, even as starting states or coordinate frames drift; validated members can substitute for one another with fresh measurements.
Road: Durable, population-audited trajectory composed of quantized arcs whose contracts remain current through ongoing measurement, backfill, and contract refresh; roads provide reliable transport through the sufficient-statistic space while still demanding periodic resurfacing as the manifold shifts.
Macro-design loop: Recursive six-stage system design cycle that moves through observable problem, modeling fidelity, measurement in model, application, drift detection, and re-specification to refine both problem definitions and solution capacity.
Orchestration layer: Control layer that maintains the arc-cohort ledger, enforces arc contracts in real time, coordinates worker pools, and promotes modules only after replay-backed audits.
Problem quantum: Atomic unit of work with defined outcome boundaries; chaining quanta forms longer arcs while ensuring the handoff of the necessary sufficient statistics.
Quantized arc: Reusable reasoning primitive that expects a defined bundle of sufficient statistics at entry, transforms them through a scoped operation, and emits an exit state that subsequent arcs can accept.
Sufficient statistics: Compressed state representing exactly the information needed to complete the current problem quantum and set up the next, used to evaluate arc entry predicates and audit causal sufficiency.
Continue the Series
Healthcare deep dive: See how dimensional blueprints, cohort ledgers, and contract-bound arcs map onto real patient programs in Healthcare Implementation and Healthcare Verification.
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