22 Frontiers of Infinitesimal Learning

LINCS begins with a declared structure. The sketch says which compositions matter; the tangent site says which perturbations are meaningful; the quotient says which variations are null; the cover says where failure can be observed; and the admission contract says what evidence licenses repair. This separation has made the applications in this book comparable without making them interchangeable.

The frontier is to let some of this structure evolve. A learning system might discover a missing context, enlarge a repair language, refine an interaction signature, or replace strict equality by coherent deformation. But a system that learns its own test can also learn to hide its failure. The central research problem is therefore not unrestricted self-modification. It is auditable structural adaptation.

¹1. The next generation of LINCS systems must learn declarations and diagnostics without allowing repair to rewrite the criterion by which it is judged. ↩