Scope and acceptance criteria
What must be true of anything in this specification, and the notation
Snapshot of this document in the GEMs repository. The repository itself is the current version. Bản chụp tài liệu này trong repo GEMs. Bản đang chạy nằm ở chính repo.
What this specification is
GEMs specifies a ~1.65 m humanoid body built to acquire physical experience on behalf of a controller that lives wholly off it: the Main Controller, on an IPC, for which each GEMs unit is a set of sensors and effectors (01).
It specifies the range of what the body can do and what each capability costs. It does not set the operating point. Wherever a value is marked ⟦CTRL⟧, the blank is deliberate: it marks a decision that is not the body's to make.
Two acceptance criteria
Everything in this specification has to pass both.
1 — The physical ceiling. No mechanism may call for physics that does not exist. Laboratory work that is expensive, unscaled, or not yet on the market is allowed. Invented physics is not. The target is the maximum that is actually achievable, reaching or slightly exceeding the near term.
2 — Service to experience. Every capability has to earn its place by serving what the body is for: acquiring physical experience as a human body does, plus selected capabilities a human body does not have. Anything that bends toward purely industrial, combat or surveillance use is reduced to the experience-serving level.
The division of authority
The body grants capability and declares what it costs. The controller decides what to do with it.
Nothing is cut at the level of the body for reasons that belong to whoever operates it — not ethics, not duty cycle, not acceptable risk. Those are decisions made by the controller, and this specification records them as blanks rather than filling them in.
This is not a disclaimer. It is a structural commitment: a body that silently withheld capability would make the controller's decisions unauditable, because nobody downstream could tell a choice from a limit.
Notation
| Mark | Meaning |
|---|---|
| TM | Commercially available |
| LAB | Demonstrated in the laboratory, not yet scaled |
⟦CTRL⟧ |
A value belonging to the controller's judgement — deliberately blank |
⟦IMPL⟧ |
A constant not yet derivable — decided at implementation, not invented here |
A figure written as a range is a range, not an average. Where a figure is sourced from published work it is marked as such; where it is derived inside this specification, the derivation is shown.
No constant is invented to look complete. A specification that fills in its own underived numbers trades honesty for the appearance of finish. Chapter 09 lists every value left open and says why.
Out of scope
| Not specified here | Where it belongs |
|---|---|
| The controller — its design, its reasoning, how it will behave | Not in this repository |
| How acquired signal becomes structured information | A companion loop specification — see 08 |
| The standard against which a body's conduct is judged | A third party: the deploying or certifying party |
| Earlier speculative material about GEMs | /vault/fiction/ |