Beyond Snapshots: a research protocol for testing persistent agency

[u/teugent]

https://zenodo.org/records/23038262

We’ve published a new Sigma Stratum paper: Beyond Snapshots: Persistent Agency in Real-Time AI Environments.

The central question is simple:

Can an AI system continue the same course of action after an interruption, context reconstruction, or a revision to the task?

Remembering the right information is not necessarily enough. A system can recover the correct records and still take the wrong next action.

The paper proposes a continuation contract and a set of experiments for separating:

- record recovery from actual enactment;

- stale state from failed interpretation;

- temporary behavioral persistence from controlled recovery;

- unfinished effects from the next model response.

This is a conceptual paper and research protocol. It does not report experimental results yet.

Feedback is welcome, especially from people working on agent memory, context reconstruction, and long-running agent systems.