The Persistence Kernel: Executable Reference Implementation

This deposit provides a minimal executable reference implementation of the Persistence Kernel, a structural framework governing identity evaluation, admissibility, constraint enforcement, exhaustion, irreversibility, and collapse. The purpose of this implementation is to demonstrate that the kernel invariants admit executable realization without importing teleological, observer-relative, or agentive primitives.

The implementation is intentionally austere. It does not encode goals, preferences, utilities, rewards, probabilities, learning rules, optimization criteria, correctness metrics, or performance objectives. The kernel is not an agent, controller, learner, decision system, or optimizer. Its sole function is to mechanically enforce the structural invariants required for persistence under transformation.

Constraint within the kernel is strictly eliminative: inadmissible continuations are removed rather than ranked or selected among. When admissible continuation is exhausted, collapse is mandatory and may irreversibly reduce expressive capacity. Structural history is append-only, and eliminated continuations are not reinstated within a regime. Post-collapse behavior is explicitly defined or terminal, ensuring that identity remains evaluable even after failure.

This executable reference exists to establish constructibility, internal consistency, and boundary clarity. It is non-canonical and non-authoritative. The formal definition of the Persistence Kernel is given in the accompanying theoretical publication; this code serves only as a reference realization demonstrating executability without hidden teleology. Any system that introduces goals, rewards, optimization, or observer-relative evaluation constitutes a derivative system and is no longer an implementation of the kernel itself.

The repository is intended for archival reference, inspection, and downstream experimentation with derivative layers implemented explicitly outside the kernel.