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v5.43.0 — BLOCKS: deterministic scene setups

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@JosephOIbrahim JosephOIbrahim released this 06 Aug 23:43
· 196 commits to master since this release
v5.43.0
c4187d0

SYNAPSE v5.43.0 — BLOCKS: deterministic scene setups

Ask twice, get the same scene

Asking a model to author a Solaris network is sampling, and a sampler is not a
function — the same request produced a different graph every time. BLOCKS moves
canonical setups out of generation entirely. A fixture is a scene setup stored
as data — node types, exact names, wires, positions, parm values. The operation is
reconcile to the definition, not create. Ask twice and the second call is a no-op;
delete it and ask again and you get the same scene, byte-for-byte.

What's proven

Fifteen checks green, headless on Houdini 22.0.368 — seven negative controls that
show each instrument can disagree, run before any invariant, then eight invariants:

claim
F-1 apply on a clean stage reproduces the committed baseline 762e3a85, byte-exact
F-2 apply → remove → apply gives the same hash
F-3 apply on an applied stage does nothing — 0 ops, hash unchanged
F-4 / F-4b an artist node outside the box keeps every authored property; a display transfer is reported by name, never silent
F-5 a name clash refuses with zero mutations, stage signature identical across the call
F-6 cross-machine portable — the same fixture hashes identically from two different $HIP values
F-7 a stray node dragged into the box is ejected and left alive, never deleted

Reproduce: hython harness/blocks/invariants_m5.py

Suite: 5765 passed, 9 failed, 147 skipped — the 9 failures pre-exist BLOCKS and
are unchanged in identity and count. +20 tests net from M5 to M5b, all new and passing.

The baseline is machine-portable

The composed USD stage carries expanded environment paths — $HIP arrives as an
absolute path on 242 of 643 lines, one of them buried mid-string in a query parameter.
The c3 canonicalizer rewrites absolute-path-valued environment variables back to their
token, so the same fixture produces the same hash on any machine. It rewrites only
absolute paths — $HIPNAME expands to the bare word untitled and $OS to the node
name, and substituting those by value would corrupt real scene content. Proven in both
directions: identical under c3 across two working directories, different under the old
c2. The prior c2 baseline (8bb05761) is recorded in the fixture with the reason it moved.

Four silent failures the harness caught

  • Node types are versioned. createNode('domelight') yields domelight::3.0 —
    comparing against the plain literal never converges, so every apply planned a
    delete-and-recreate. The stable identity is nameComponents()[2].
  • Create auto-renames silently. createNode, createNetworkBox and setName all
    rename on a clash and raise nothing — which is why the collision gate must run before
    creation, since afterwards the scene is already mutated.
  • NetworkBox.destroy() keeps its members by default. Removal would have orphaned every node.
  • A parm's authored value is unexpandedString(), not eval(). The camera's default
    primpath /cameras/$OS evaluates to exactly what the fixture declares — comparing on
    eval() reports "already correct" and never writes the literal.

Phantom-API gate, closed wider than expected

The committed Houdini symbol table was regenerated on 22.0.368 (35903 symbols; five
symbols stamped for 22.0.397 that do not exist on this build were removed) with a
load-time build check. Regenerating it surfaced a larger hole: an uninjected in-Houdini
process was silently serving H21 symbols as authority on an H22 host, with no
staleness signal. Closed by making the Houdini environment a host-agnostic source of the
running build.

The evidence harness underneath (AUTORESEARCH)

Three tiers: Claude orchestrates, a local model authors and triages questions through
ollama at zero API cost, hython executes probes deterministically. The model may author
questions; only probes produce answers, and proposed missions pass a literal
fence plus schema validation before they can run. First campaign: 55 answers, 0 failures.
It confirmed four dead H22 literals with live successors mapped, caught
karmarenderproperties deprecated one step before it entered the fixture, and found
Houdini stamping session node IDs into composed USD — the canonicalizer rule without
which cross-session determinism was impossible.

Not done

No phrase routing (M6) — both tools take a fixture name; typing "basic Solaris setup"
resolves to nothing yet. No panel surface for the verdict line. No USD customData
(RFC-gated). solaris.basic remains the only fixture.

Full changelog: https://github.com/JosephOIbrahim/Synapse/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

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