A comprehensive terminology reference for the NABU cognitive substrate.
The fundamental unit of memory in NABU. A lineage represents a single piece of knowledge with associated metadata including weight, decay rate, rigidity, confidence, and access history. Lineages are stored in pre-allocated arenas and accessed via lightweight facade cursors.
An associative connection between two lineages, formed through temporal co-activation (Hebbian learning). Bonds have strength, polarity (excitatory/neutral/inhibitory), and access timestamps. The bond network forms NABU's associative memory graph.
A pre-allocated contiguous memory buffer (TypedArray) for storing cognitive primitives. Arenas eliminate garbage collection overhead in the hot path. Examples: Lineage Arena, Bond Arena, Neuro Arena, Attention Arena, Salience Arena.
The discrete time unit of NABU's cognitive cycle. All decay, learning, and propagation calculations are based on tick deltas rather than wall-clock time.
A normalized value
The speed at which memory weight erodes over time. Higher decay rates cause faster forgetting. Modulated by rigidity and personality genome.
A value
The act of accessing or activating a lineage, which reinforces its weight and delays decay. Similar to spaced repetition in human memory.
A finite resource
A pre-attentive score
A filtering mechanism inspired by the biological thalamus. Prevents cognitive flooding by rejecting low-salience inputs before they consume attention resources.
The difference between an input and the current context (EMA). High contrast indicates a significant change worthy of attention.
Inverse of familiarity, calculated as
Fast, parallel, autonomous processing for high-confidence inputs (
Slow, serial, deliberate processing for medium-confidence inputs (
High-cost processing for novel, low-confidence inputs (
A routing metric
A global physics modifier that affects cognitive parameters system-wide. NABU implements four synthetic hormones.
Reward/curiosity hormone. Increases learning rate, encouraging exploration and pattern acquisition.
Stress/threat hormone. Increases rigidity, inhibiting new learning and protecting existing memories during perceived danger.
Stability/confidence hormone. Accelerates attention recovery and promotes homeostatic balance.
Urgency/energy hormone. Sharpens focus (increases processing cost) and reduces memory decay rate.
The tendency of hormones to return to their personality baseline over time, rather than zero. Ensures emotional stability and prevents runaway hormonal states.
The survival-priority component implementing fear conditioning. Provides rapid veto ("hijack") over attention routing when global caution is high.
A one-shot conditioned response to intense pain (
A system-wide inhibitor
A defensive state triggered by high global caution. Blocks the Synthesis route (preventing exploration) and inverts novelty's valence (treating the unknown as threatening).
The immediate veto of exploratory processing when fear mode is active. Prioritizes survival over learning.
The intensity of negative outcomes, amplified by surprise (novelty). Formula:
The spreading activation of signals through the bond network from an origin lineage to connected targets.
The formula governing signal attenuation:
The maximum hop count (default: 3) for signal propagation. Prevents infinite cascade loops.
The minimum energy threshold (default: 0.1) below which signals are terminated. Prevents computational waste on imperceptible signals.
The ternary nature of bonds: Excitatory (+1) amplifies, Neutral (0) conducts without change, Inhibitory (-1) suppresses.
Competitive selection among accumulated signals. The strongest positive signal suppresses weaker competitors by a suppression factor.
A global normalization mechanism that maintains mean weight around a target value. Prevents signal collapse as the memory population grows. Trauma-locked lineages are exempt.
The identification of lineages that haven't been accessed for a threshold duration (default: 100 ticks). Combined with low weight, marks candidates for garbage collection.
The eviction of dormant, low-weight lineages to maintain memory efficiency. Emits events to prevent dangling reference issues.
A protection window (default: 10 ticks) during which newly created lineages are exempt from idle detection.
Weight variance used as a measure of system "diffusion" vs "conglomeration". Homeostatic scaling naturally reduces this value.
A validated configuration object injected at kernel initialization. Defines the personality's cognitive boundaries (decay rate, learning rate, pain sensitivity, etc.).
Pre-tuned, immutable personality presets (e.g., SENTINEL, STOIC, MUSE) that configure the genome for specific behavioral profiles.
Boot-time validation that rejects genomes with pathological parameters (e.g., zero pain sensitivity, runaway learning rates).
The three-layer cognitive model: Reptilian (physics), Limbic (emotion), Neocortical (reasoning). Each layer operates at different speeds and abstractions.
The memory layout philosophy prioritizing cache locality and avoiding garbage collection. Uses TypedArray arenas with facade accessors.
A lightweight cursor object holding only an index (pointer) into an arena. Provides OOP ergonomics without heap allocation overhead.
The per-tick cognitive cycle that must execute with zero heap allocations to maintain real-time performance.
Statistical measure of formula accuracy. NABU requires
The maximum time (16ms at 60 FPS) allowed for all cognitive processing per tick. Exceeding this causes "cognitive jitter."
Measured in operations per second. The NABU kernel achieves ~5.5M ops/sec on standard hardware.