LAB / WMSI-EXP-068
Decoder-Belief Decoupling.
Can a system speak from a current best branch while preserving alternative hypotheses in a separate epistemic state?
01 / QUESTION
Ambiguity and Latent Multi-Hypothesis Reasoning
Can a system speak from a current best branch while preserving alternative hypotheses in a separate epistemic state?
This is a protocol scaffold, not a completed experiment or a frozen execution plan. No measured effect or research conclusion is claimed here.
Hypothesis to test
The manipulation described below produces a reproducible, condition-specific change in the measured system behavior or internal state that is not explained by the ordinary controls.
Ordinary competing explanation
The observed pattern is explained by ordinary sampling variation, prompt/representation artifacts, surface lexical cues, evaluator bias, or the known product/runtime mechanics captured by the controls.
02 / PLANNED DESIGN
How we intend to test it
Separate reporting decoder from persistent hypothesis state; prevent generated prose from directly rewriting beliefs.
Controls
Normal chat self-conditioning; same total compute.
What we would measure
Calibration, reversibility after new evidence, contradiction handling, branch diversity.
Access and instruments
Ordinary software or API access. This describes access requirements, not verified readiness on our Spark.
Custom agent architecture; state DB.
Before a full run
Feasibility=NOW; priority=P0. Before confirmatory execution, run a small pilot to estimate variance/cost, freeze the scoring rules, and assign a run-count target.
Model revisions, final prompts, sample sizes, cost limits, and scoring rules must be settled through the pilot and protocol-freeze process.
03 / INTERPRETATION
What could fool us
External state doing all the work, evaluator favoring verbosity, unequal compute.
What would weaken the idea
If decoupling does not reduce premature convergence or hallucination, the separation adds little.
Observation, inference, speculation, unknowns, and apparatus errors will be labeled separately. One striking transcript cannot establish a general effect.
04 / RECORD
Evidence we plan to preserve
Hypothesis state at each update, evidence events, final report, probabilities, branch deletions.
Planned visual evidence
Belief-vs-language divergence timeline.
No research runs or raw datasets are published for this experiment. The September 26, 2026 registry and protocol compendium (version 1.0) are the sources for this planning record.
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