Scope: six repositories pinned in source-pins.json. Commit metadata is a repository record, not independent proof of when an idea was invented. “Earliest” below means earliest identified in the available inspected history. Source identity proves shared content, not authorship or whole-system semantic equivalence.
The researcher describes Knuth, discrete mathematics, recursion and CWEB as the starting point. That intent is preserved in the supplied charter. The original mathematics paper and historical 34-page PDF were not supplied in this workspace. Their detailed technical claims remain tier C; no publication chronology or paper quotation is manufactured here.
| Record | Pinned evidence | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation repository and early TISC/VM specifications | Initial 049d1d929d3558deac4b68a1bcc2cfdeb6128359, 2025-11-21; TISC spec bf6dd85834a010044f59766a6aca8c40ac2ba0b9; VM spec eed6107cbee1cb2e059be6763c59281fe003fa6a |
Modern repository/spec history is older than the currently published Hanoi Git import. Specifications alone do not establish execution correctness. |
| Hanoi-family CWEB archived inside Foundation | fe00396831c8bb249fde06a04186fa02f6018caf, 2025-11-22, legacy/hanoivm/src/hanoivm_core/ |
Concrete earlier source for recursion, promotion and arithmetic hypotheses. Archive removal 03112f6ce583905f13bfc88a6e07db7ea3a5a1ca, 2026-03-06, did not erase the objects. |
| Numeric and compiler implementation surfaces | Foundation parser history includes ee351c9436b972ac868a84ddb68982cb27f7a669, 2025-11-24; tensor header 9dcda5bd4e5f6021097e2bfc967b41bcc7033827, 2025-11-22; Axion policy implementation 649e235c60c1b269449d5a8419e6ced902a755b2, 2025-12-04 |
Actual code paths developed alongside specifications. These dates do not establish that all named components worked together. |
| t81lib | Root 87e480c5fae5082aa5807bb0bd28d836b9c9d478, 2025-12-09; inspected head 995ea70796259a8f9c5f265a6cb3084143e2b949 |
Separate numerical/quantization work. Current README speed claims are not reproduced measurements in this packet. |
| Foundation to t81-lang extraction | Split initial dc9ec92044876651aa2531b2879413285b388961, 2026-02-08; parser blob b0a3812386063a2aa60d6a0b7e4643330ec936b0 matches Foundation 77c77098ad821ecd2c8452c3e7ab4f5eefae1760, 2026-02-07 |
Documented migration direction corroborated by byte identity, not merely shared terminology. |
| Standalone t81-vm | Bootstrap 68b32caef7f07e5f7d030b9b0ba63d0736c2b208, 2026-02-08; head 4e2bba639d05249722db847563ae37991289ea52 |
A separate runtime scaffold/adaptation. Its migration plan explicitly rejects wholesale copying of the Foundation VM and the legacy Hanoi archive. Full parity is not inferred. |
| Hardware baseline | RTL introduced 3ea4bccf0dfa867cf8186ff886c9d716bb7b96dc, 2026-02-08; inspected head 834521d4e6b37cf8c871b1ac64af449ff6493b7d |
Executable-looking digital RTL defines signed two-bit trit signals and saturating operations. No physical three-state element cost or fabricated-device advantage is measured here. |
| Modern Foundation tiers | 2f93753f387864d8d09e0edadd29381032680264, 2026-02-26, tier-limit module; inspected Foundation head f6d4d680709c5c6c98b305628e04346f5ef61620 |
Tier0..Tier6 resource/recursion limits are distinguishable from Hanoi’s 81/243/729 scheduler labels. Common numbers do not establish an identical model. |
| Current public Hanoi import | 59205d76db4aca3da7c0bdc521924b8f9bc52cc3, 2026-10-25, sole reachable commit |
Makes the precursor source available now; does not date its original development. Forty-one source blobs occur in Foundation history. |
Foundation historical legacy/hanoivm/src/hanoivm_core/t81recursion.cweb and current Hanoi src/t81recursion.cweb share Git blob d9a0d3301ebc5820b7997db5d09965414ad65883 and SHA-256 8261d418037a5e9d9b95ca48c4c9071fdbac156c263059fe6b4d29c3c1db4834. The full 41-blob inventory records exact historical paths. Arithmetic, scheduler and promotion files are not claimed to be byte-identical merely because their names match.
Foundation parser at 77c77098… and t81-lang initial parser at dc9ec920… share blob b0a3812386063a2aa60d6a0b7e4643330ec936b0 and SHA-256 ba61bb2cf6a8816a42db61bbac3a8ed5cf6b59591a20fd94fc37c717ad9258e6. The split’s scripts/migrate-from-foundation.sh:4-8,35-40 explicitly copies frontend assets from Foundation. Its migration TSV records paths, not source commit IDs; the pinned blob comparison closes that gap for this parser revision only.
The standalone VM’s docs/foundation-migration.md:27-31,60-72 calls for copying the interface pattern, locally reimplementing components, and not migrating the legacy CWEB tree. This supports conceptual/contract lineage, not a proof that its VM body is inherited or equivalent. Its src/vm/loader.cpp:11-16 parses a tier policy and its src/vm/vm.cpp:894 has a tier-zero deny predicate; these are not interchangeable evidence for Foundation’s full Axion engine or historical AxionAI.
At Hanoi head, src/tier_scheduler.cweb:37-44 selects 729 for entropy/depth over 100 or an AI intent substring; otherwise 243 over 40, else 81. Line 56 writes ctx->tier_mode. src/hvm_promotion.cweb:40-60,99-121 instead defines modes 0/1/2, promotes at call depth over 10 and on tensor-op detection, and writes ctx->mode. The shown VM context in src/hanoivm_vm.cweb:41-48 has mode, not tier_mode; referenced integration headers are not present under the expected paths. The VM and promotion files also assign different numeric constants to some promotion opcodes. This is inspected inconsistency/under-specification, not an executed integration failure.
src/hanoivm_vm.cweb:90,181,231 repeats operation-table definitions and includes null handlers. Combined with the failed root dry run, this prevents treating the source collection as a validated integrated VM. No null handler was executed in this session.
Foundation vm/tier_limits.cpp:29-47 maps cognitive tiers to recursion limits 0,1,10,81,243,729,2187. That is a resource policy, not a declaration of radix width. The T729Tensor name does not impose a 729-element tensor; its shape is dynamic. Historical AxionAI entropy/NLP/kernel-control intent and modern kernel/axion/policy_engine.cpp authorization contracts share a research theme, but their behavioral equivalence is unproved.
The current CWEB’s TernaryNum comment advertises digits -1/0/1. Verbatim functions at lines 82,100,108 were extracted and compiled with Apple Clang 21, C11, O2 and strict warnings. Independent interpretation is a + 3b + 9c. Only exactly representable outputs in [-13,13] count; overflow cases are excluded.
Addition fails 422 of 547 cases; multiplication fails 140 of 201; negation fails zero of 27. Addition normalizes into 0/1/2 rather than the advertised balanced domain. Multiplication is componentwise and lacks positional cross-products: (0,1,0) times (1,0,0), representing 3 times 1, returns zero. The multiplication comment explicitly says componentwise: such an operation can be valid for a vector algebra, but cannot be substituted for positional integer multiplication. The reported multiplication failures are against the stated integer oracle, not against every possible three-state algebra. The earlier Foundation arithmetic archive also documents componentwise multiplication, but its addition body differs; current probe counts are not attributed to that earlier revision.
See results, exact extracted C, and reproduction script. The isolated oracle is not a full CWEB build, benchmark, physical-device experiment or proof about modern Foundation arithmetic.
Private pre-publication chronology, original Knuth notes, the named PDF/transcripts and the original LLM mathematics paper remain unavailable. No private-history inference is made from filesystem dates, archive dates or README prose. Complete source inheritance into modern Foundation VM/Axion, whole-system Hanoi reachability and an operational common tier-domain contract remain unproved. These gaps are recorded rather than filled with a more elaborate architecture.