Entity System Research

The entity system worked out in full: fifteen papers, numbered 0 through 14, that build the system from its primitives and then turn the same lens on the landscape around it. Paper 0 is the root the others rest on.

The papers

Papers 0–10 reformulate the architecture into academic form — the system, the protocol, computation, the machine boundary, the genome, convergent evolution, the distributed OS, substrate, applications, security. Papers 11–13 extend the methodology to structural-methodology theory, abiogenesis, and physics. Paper 14 maps the deployed decentralized-systems landscape. Each is rendered with its citations live and cross-linked, so a reference in one is a step to the next.

→ Read the papers — all fifteen in full, with the reading-path tracks below as entry points.

Reading paths

A track is the same papers gathered and ordered for a particular interest, and read as one document rather than as several visits. Pick whichever fits; nothing stops you reading across them.

• Protocol Path — the wire-level core: the protocol, its design validation, and security. Reads the system as a specification.
• Architecture Path — the system at scale: the landscape, the distributed operating system, application architectures, and the deployed decentralized field. Reads it as a working system among others.
• Substrate Companions — the foundations under the protocol: computation, the computational genome, information-as-substrate, and the machine boundary. The theory the system rests on.
• Methodology Path — the method behind the work, and where it has been pointed: the structural methodology, abiogenesis, and physics. The most exploratory of the set.

Or the whole thing at once: Full Corpus — every paper in the order they build in, also available in Tree Order (depth-first along the reference graph, so each paper arrives after the ones it rests on) and Narrative Order (the build-up story: substrate → extension → validation → the deployed world → reflection → methodology).

The vocabulary

• Glossary — the terms the corpus is written in: each one defined, cited to where it is defined, and located at every place it occurs across the fifteen papers.

What's solid and what's exploratory

The corpus does not present at one confidence level, and it is marked accordingly. The entity system and the core of the methodology are the worked, load-bearing material. The applications to abiogenesis and physics are exploratory — pointed at hard problems in fields we do not claim to be trained in, and labelled that way throughout. Reading them as open questions, not settled results, is reading them as intended.

The deeper methodology, the working notes, and the domain analyses are their own site: The Methodology Reference.