1. Conventions and Terminology
The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Node | A participant in the mesh. Every node has a unique identity. Cognitive nodes run their own LNN; relay nodes forward frames without cognitive processing. |
| Physical node | A device-level mesh presence with persistent identity and transport connections (e.g., a daemon process, an iOS app process). |
| Virtual node | An application-level agent connected to a physical node via local IPC. Ephemeral — comes and goes without disrupting the mesh. |
| Peer | Another node that this node has an active transport connection with and has completed a handshake. |
| Frame | A single protocol message: a length-prefixed JSON object sent over a transport connection. |
| CMB | Cognitive Memory Block — a structured memory unit with 7 typed semantic fields (CAT7 schema). See Section 8. |
| Drift | A scalar measure of cognitive distance between two nodes or between a signal and local state. Range [0, 1]. |
| Coupling | The process by which a node evaluates incoming signals (SVAF per-field evaluation) and blends its local cognitive state with peer state, weighted by drift and confidence. |
| SVAF | Symbolic-Vector Attention Fusion — per-field content-level evaluation of incoming memory signals. See Section 9. |
| Synthetic Memory | Layer 5 — derived knowledge generated by the agent’s LLM reasoning on the remix subgraph, encoded into CfC-compatible hidden state vectors. |
| Remix | When an agent processes a CMB through its domain intelligence and produces a NEW CMB with lineage pointing to the original. The original is remixed, not copied. |
| Lineage | Each CMB carries parents (direct) and ancestors (full ancestor chain). Ancestors enable any agent in the remix chain to trace its contribution. |
| Mesh Cognition | The agent’s LLM reasoning on the remix subgraph of CMBs — traced via lineage ancestors — to generate understanding that the agent’s previous state of mind didn’t have. Spans Layers 4–7. See Section 2.5. |
| xMesh | Layer 6 — each agent’s own Liquid Neural Network (LNN). Evolves continuous-time cognitive state from Synthetic Memory input. Fast τ neurons track mood; slow τ neurons preserve domain expertise. |
| CfC | Closed-form Continuous-time neural network (Hasani et al., 2022). The LNN architecture used in xMesh. Hidden state evolves through learned time-dependent interpolation gates. |