Glossary

Every italicized first-use definition from the main text, in order of appearance. Plain words only; the technical version lives in the chapter’s Under the hood boxes.

Part 1

training — the study phase of a machine brain: learning from a big pile of examples before the machine ever does its real job. (Ch 1)

frozen — a brain whose learning has been switched off: a snapshot of what was learned during training, shipped as the product. (Ch 1)

catastrophic forgetting — new learning destroying old competence, because both are stored in the same shared numbers. (Ch 2)

dimensions — the separate knobs you’d need on a control panel to pin down what state a thing is in; a world’s hidden size is its knob count. (Ch 3)

Part 2

triplet — one recorded moment of experience: what I sensed, what I did, and what I sensed next. The only input PRA ever learns from. (Ch 4)

observation — one simultaneous reading of every sensor, packed into a fixed-order list of numbers. The “before” and “after” of a triplet are both observations. (Ch 4)

Part 3

frame — one member of the crowd: a bet that the world can be described with a particular number of knobs, backed by placing every sight on those knobs and predicting where they’ll land next. (Ch 6)

pose — where a frame’s knobs point for the current observation: the frame’s reading of one moment, expressed in its own coordinates. Not the frame itself, and not the world. (Ch 6)

encoder — the small network that reads one observation onto a frame’s knobs: observation in, pose out. (Ch 6)

decoder — the encoder’s mirror: pose in, reconstructed observation out, proving the frame’s knobs can still express what it is looking at. (Ch 6)

drive — the fixed, unlearnable rule that scores which action looks worth taking; the system’s motivation, kept outside the market. (Ch 9)

competence drive — the shipped default motivation: prefer the familiar and the mastered, weighted by how well prediction is going there. (Ch 9)

frontier drive — the current edge: prefer places where prediction error has been falling, so noise and mastered ground both score zero. (Ch 9)

Part 4

snapshot — the brain paused into a file: the complete learned state written out, so the same mind can be stopped, copied, moved, and resumed exactly. (Ch 11)

Part 5

pre-registration — deciding what will count as success, and what will count as failure, before an experiment runs, so the goalposts cannot move once the data is in. (Ch 13)

Part 6

oracle — a measurement taken by peeking at the world’s ground truth, which the brain itself could never make, used to mark the ceiling of what any learnable version could reach. (Ch 14)

election — choosing, on purpose, to begin a sequence you know: its first step and all the steps after it. (Ch 14)

completion itch — a small standing pull that makes begun things want finishing: starting is worth a little, continuing is worth more, and abandoning charges everything sunk. (Ch 14)

event head — a small second predictor beside the frames, one model per action, predicting how every sensed number will change next; learned online from lived steps and built to be sharp about the moments when a number jumps. (Ch 14)

post-approval hangover — the measured backfire of making expected praise valuable: right after praise lands, the praised loop’s own next steps all predict praise going away, so the learner avoids the loop that earned it. (Ch 15)

recipe memory — the remembered sequence of observations from a demonstrated success, kept whole and in order, so the steps that led to a result can be walked again. (Ch 16)

the obsessive — the failure twin of a borrowed goal: a learner that pursues what its teacher applauds until its own goals lose time to it. (Ch 16)

the parrot — the failure twin of taught order: a learner performing remembered recipe steps somewhere they do not apply. (Ch 16)

provisioning — a parent covering a child’s costs until the child’s own competence can pay them. (Ch 16)

the stipend — this project’s measured dose of provisioning: the parent pays the whole metabolic bill through tick 1,500, then coverage fades in a straight line to nothing at tick 3,000, and the learner lives at full stakes after that. (Ch 16)