CIRISHolon

A decentralized physics and graphics unified engine, designed for scalability and performance — from WASM in a browser up through large clusters — in which every level of detail is a certified view of the level below.

One recursive object — the holon — carries every tier: bit-exact classical and quantum simulation at the bottom (measured against the field's own tools; see conformance/BENCHMARKS.md), matter and graphics tiers above, one merge law and one transport square binding them, and the same deterministic, auditable results at every scale from a browser tab to a thousand-shard mesh. The tier ladder, its referees, and its benchmark targets live in TIERS.md.

What that means, concretely

The engine's unit is the holon: a component that is simultaneously a whole (it runs its own dynamics) and a part (it is a coarse reading of finer holons). A tier — grain, sandbox, landscape, up the ladder — is not a separately-authored physics module. It is a view v of the tier below, and it is admitted into the engine only when its square commutes: some update h on the coarse readings reproduces what the fine dynamics T does, v ∘ T = h ∘ v, within a stated budget. That property is called Closed, it is defined in lean/CIRISHolon/Object.lean, and it is the acceptance criterion for every tier boundary, level-of-detail scheme, and chart in this engine.

The payoff is engineering, not philosophy:

• Scaling is correct by construction. A tier that passes its closure gate may be run in place of the tier below it. The budget for the approximation (K ≤ 1 non-expansiveness) is tested, not assumed.
• Failures are certificates, not mysteries. When a coarse view is wrong, it is wrong in exactly one way: two fine states the view cannot tell apart that evolve to readings it can. The conformance harness hunts those witness pairs directly (nonfactoring_iff_not_closed).
• Charts carry their condition numbers. A near-cancelling aggregate (e.g. net momentum of a settled region) amplifies noise by the inverse of its coherence — exactly, provably. Such quantities are never exposed as engine state without their conditioning declared.
• Maintenance is priced, never tuned. Refresh/decay budgets follow a closed-form law (Ginf, Wstar): choose a retention target, the dose is computed.
• The quantum boundary is honest. The classical engine is the diagonal retract of a quantum carrier; classical circuits run at mesh cost, stabilizer circuits in a closed tableau view, and past the point where coherence makes closure impossible (a theorem, not a policy) the engine spends known-exponential resources, delegates to hardware, or refuses by name. The QASM conformance target exercises exactly this boundary.

Repository layout

• lean/ — the object: the engine's contract as machine-checked theorems, verified under Lean 4 / Mathlib (toolchain and revision pinned). Object.lean (the question, conditioning, rent, the diagonal and its wall), Tiers.lean (stacking algebra), Tier.lean (the certified boundary as a bundle), Transport.lean (re-rooting and the certificate fence), Mixing.lean (why stochastic tiers self-heal and deterministic ones never do), Budget.lean (error composition; the K ≤ 1 linear budget), Stabilizer.lean (the Clifford stratum's closure kernel and the magic wall).
• OBJECT.md — the contract in prose: definitions, design rules, and the conformance obligations every tier owes.
• LESSONS.md — binding design rules distilled from the predecessor sandbox's measured failures. Read before writing any tier.
• conformance/ — the acceptance battery, transplanted with its bands.
• engine/ — the predecessor crates, grandfathered (see engine/ENGINE.md): working and gated by their own CI script, not yet certified tier by tier; any crate touched enters the battery at that touch.

License and ethical use

CIRISHolon is licensed under the GNU AGPL-3.0 (see LICENSE). This project is intended for ethical use cases only, as understood by the CIRIS Covenant. We state precisely how that intention binds, because pretending a copyright license can carry it would be false:

• The code license is pure AGPL-3.0, with no added restrictions. The AGPL grants its freedoms without discrimination by field of use, and its terms (§7, §10) do not permit bolting an ethics clause onto it; a license modified to do so would no longer be the AGPL and would be incompatible with the ecosystem this project belongs to. We do not pretend otherwise. The AGPL's network copyleft is itself the structural safeguard we rely on most: anyone operating a modified CIRISHolon as a service must offer its source to that service's users.
• The name is where the ethics gate is enforceable. "CIRISHolon" and the CIRIS marks may be used only by deployments consistent with the CIRIS Covenant. Forks are welcome under the AGPL; calling an unethical deployment by this project's name is not.
• The community is governed by the Covenant. Contribution, maintainer support, partnership, and any commercial licensing beyond the AGPL are extended only to Covenant-aligned uses, at the maintainers' discretion.

If your use case needs a grant the AGPL does not give, the ethical-use review IS the licensing conversation: contact the maintainers.

Relationship to CIRISOntology

The theorems in lean/ are transplanted verbatim from CIRISAI/CIRISOntology, where they were developed, machine-checked, and pressed against measurement campaigns (a quantum device, a thermodynamic memory dataset, and the predecessor engine). That repository is the research programme; this one is the engine. They are deliberately decoupled: the only dependency is the pinned conformance contract, and misfits found here are reported back there.

Convergent work

An independent 2026 programme, "Six Birds" (Ioannis Tsiokos — arXiv 2602.00134, 2604.03239, code at ioannist/six-birds-agent), arrived at much of the same object from its own direction: objects as induced closures under a coarse-graining lens, a computable idempotence defect where we compute a closure defect, ledger-gated maintenance where we charge rent, and a measured "enabling repair collapses the defect" where we prove that maintenance creates what it maintains. No citation links the two programmes in either direction; we treat the convergence as corroboration that the underlying object is real, not as a priority contest. The verified two-way concept map and the cross-validation protocol live in conformance/omega/PRIOR_ART_CONVERGENCE.md.