Part 5 Flashcards

Seven terms to carry out of this Part: governance graph, counter-metric, audit loop, arbitration edge, drift, anchor, and frozen node. Blank out the second column, work down the list saying each one aloud, and pay attention to any you can only describe by giving the example instead of the idea.

Term	Definition
Governance graph	A small graph laid over the one holding the actual work, whose nodes are the running loops and whose edges record how they stand to one another — who supplies whom, who passes judgment on whom, whose call wins.
Counter-metric	A second measurement, deliberately chosen so it worsens whenever the first one is being satisfied by a shortcut, kept in the hands of someone other than the loop it watches and never given to that loop as an input.
Audit loop	A separate pass that takes in many units at once on its own schedule, added because some defects only exist between units and are therefore invisible to a loop examining them one at a time.
Arbitration edge	A written precedence rule sitting in the governance graph rather than inside either party, deciding in advance which of two loops gets its way when both want the same resource at the same moment.
Drift	What happens when the world a loop was tuned against keeps moving and the loop's notion of a good result does not — visible from outside as declining usefulness, invisible from inside because every number the loop computes is computed against the stale notion.
Anchor	An input a governance graph draws from somewhere no loop in it wrote or can influence — a suite that genuinely ran, a person who genuinely reacted, a directory listing, the clock — supplying the one thing mutual agreement never can.
Frozen node	A rule or fact placed permanently beyond every loop's write access, so that the standard a system is held to can only change by a person deciding to change it, never as a convenient side effect of clearing a check.