ifc-0217

16.1 The AGENTIC simulator contract

The base meta-sketch declares simulator state, legal interventions, observations, costs, and reset semantics. It also separates the simulator’s private implementation from the public scientific interface. A component may query the latter but may not inspect source code, hidden parameters, or random seeds unless a specific oracle control permits it.

 

Simulator role

Constructed object

Evidence obligation

CLIC

Diagnose mechanisms and select counter-witness interventions

Causal variable, mechanism, factorization, or discriminating experiment

Held-out intervention prediction and explicit alternatives

OPTIC

Compile scientific requests into executable procedures

Probe, measurement, intervention macro, or analysis pipeline

Type, execution, safety, and measurement-semantics tests

RELIC

Allocate sequential experiments and deploy admitted operations

Experiment policy, stopping rule, or regime-conditioned decision schema

Utility and calibration under matched cost

An interface admission record checks that the intervention CLIC requested is the one OPTIC implemented and the one RELIC evaluated. This sounds administrative, but it is scientifically substantive: an apparently successful experiment may measure a proxy, perturb several mechanisms, or induce a regime outside the causal proposal’s scope.

The simulator package \(\mathfrak R_{\mathrm{sim}}\) contains the scientific sketch, executable interface and realization, intervention doctrine, abstraction maps, observers, admission rules, and proposal grammar. A revision is therefore a package comparison

\[ \Upsilon _{\mathrm{sim}}: \mathfrak R_{\mathrm{sim}}\longrightarrow \mathfrak R_{\mathrm{sim}}^+, \]

whose presentation and executable components may be the maps \(J\) and \(K\) below. The applicable controls \(\mathsf{Ctl}_{\mathrm{sim}}\) include the current or no-change theory, richer parameter fitting, registered fixed-theory factorizations, alternative latent dimensions or mechanism families, measurement and interface misspecification, matched-random interventions, unsupported worlds, and separate simulator oracles. An extension branch opens only after its registered alternatives fail; simulator access does not make that nonrealizability claim automatic.