propagation-is-safe-and-terminating
IN derived (depth 2)
Truth propagation is both lifecycle-safe and guaranteed to terminate: retracted nodes are skipped, trigger nodes are never recomputed, BFS prevents stack overflow, and stop-on-unchanged prevents oscillation — propagation respects every node state it encounters.
Summary
The system's truth propagation process is both safe and guaranteed to finish. It combines two independent guarantees: it will always terminate without infinite loops or stack overflows, and it will correctly handle nodes in any lifecycle state, never accidentally reviving retracted nodes or re-evaluating the node that kicked off the propagation. Together these mean you can invoke propagation without worrying about runaway computation or corrupted node states.
Justifications
SL — Termination guarantees and lifecycle-awareness are independent properties that together ensure safe traversal
Antecedents (all must be IN):
- propagation-terminates-deterministically — Truth propagation is guaranteed to terminate: BFS prevents stack overflow, stop-on-unchanged prevents oscillation, and fixpoint iteration bounds the outer loop
- propagation-respects-node-lifecycle — Truth propagation respects node lifecycle states: retracted nodes are skipped during BFS traversal, and the trigger node itself is never recomputed — callers must set its truth value before invoking propagation.
Dependents
These beliefs depend on this one:
- contradiction-resolution-is-lifecycle-safe — When contradictions are detected, the entire resolution pipeline respects node lifecycle: backtracking identifies the least-entrenched culprit premise deterministically, retraction cascades through BFS propagation that skips retracted nodes and stops on unchanged truth values, ensuring resolution terminates without disturbing lifecycle-inert nodes.
- defeat-reversal-propagates-automatically — All outlist-based defeat mechanisms (challenge, kill-switch, supersession) not only reverse in principle but propagate recovery automatically through safe terminating BFS — when a defeating node is retracted, the outlist entry becomes satisfied, and propagation cascades truth-value restoration to all affected nodes without manual re-assertion
- incremental-propagation-is-fully-complete — Incremental truth propagation reaches every node whose truth value should change — including nodes that depend via outlist entries — without requiring periodic full recomputation, because safe terminating BFS traversal operates over a dependents index that tracks both antecedent and outlist relationships.
- llm-mutations-are-bounded-end-to-end — LLM-driven belief derivation is bounded at every stage of the pipeline: input validation (fail-soft filtering, Jaccard retraction guard, environment isolation), atomic persistence (context-managed load/save), and output propagation (deterministic terminating BFS with lifecycle-aware traversal).
- mutation-pipeline-produces-consistent-state — Every mutation produces a fully consistent persisted network: atomic load/save ensures no partial writes, deterministic propagation ensures all truth values are correctly derived, and lifecycle-aware traversal prevents stale recomputations.
- mutations-are-atomic-and-safely-propagated — Every network mutation follows an end-to-end safety pipeline: API context management ensures atomic load/save with write-flag gating, truth propagation terminates deterministically with lifecycle-aware BFS traversal, and snapshot persistence captures the final consistent state — no mutation can produce an inconsistent or divergent network.
- propagation-automatically-cascades-on-all-truth-changes — Truth propagation automatically cascades to all dependent nodes whenever any node's truth value changes, including nodes that appear only in outlists — making GATE belief re-evaluation fully automatic with no manual intervention required after outlist node retraction.
- propagation-is-safe-under-graph-inconsistency — Truth propagation achieves correctness even when the dependency graph contains dangling references: missing nodes are skipped with structured warnings rather than crashing, dangling IDs are excluded from both the changed and visited sets, and this graceful degradation composes with the underlying termination and lifecycle-awareness guarantees for all reachable nodes.
- retraction-cascade-is-transitive-and-terminating — Retraction cascades are both transitive in reach (propagating OUT to all transitively dependent SL-derived nodes, not just direct children) and guaranteed to terminate safely (BFS prevents oscillation, retracted nodes are skipped, and the cascade stops when no truth values change) — ensuring thorough impact without risk of runaway propagation.