- program
- One public research topic (e.g. "AML drug repurposing") with its maintainers, pool, ledger and graph.
- maintainer
- A named person who owns a program: approves proposals, signs off findings.
- research graph
- The typed graph research-graph/1 (~/.claude/RESEARCH_GRAPH.md): question → hypothesis → experiment → finding → caveat, plus proposals.
- question (Q)
- What an experiment asks, one sentence.
- hypothesis (H)
- A falsifiable prediction with a metric and a threshold; *pre-registered* when written before the test.
- experiment (E)
- One run of the harness that tests a hypothesis.
- finding (F)
- The result of an experiment: verdict (confirmed / refuted / partial / null / pending) and metrics read from artifacts.
- caveat (C)
- A threat to a finding's validity (confound, sample size, leakage); open until an experiment controls it.
- proposal (N)
- A planned experiment with value and cost (1–5 each); score = value ÷ cost.
- frontier
- Ranked proposals + open caveats + findings that motivated nothing yet. The donation menu.
- claim
- A published statement bound to the stored script/query that produced it and the value it must return (lab/proof.py).
- re-verify
- Re-execute a claim's stored script and compare to the stored value.
- verified-claim rate
- claims whose re-execution matches the stored value ÷ all published claims, over the trailing 30 days.
- provenance tier
- Where a fact came from, strongest first: measured, label, document, discussion, unsourced (harness/provenance.py).
- pool
- A program's unspent donations, in arrival order.
- FIFO attribution
- Each recorded cost is paid by the oldest unspent donation in the pool, split at donation boundaries.
- credit line
- The list of donors and amounts that paid for one experiment, shown on its finding.
- cost per finding
- program spend in USD (tokens + compute) ÷ findings with a final verdict (confirmed / refuted / null), over the program's lifetime.
- donor conversion
- unique donors ÷ unique readers of a program page, over 30 days.
- substrate
- The data sources a run may read. In Bistro: public sources only (OpenAlex, Europe PMC, arXiv, …).
- harness
- The run loop: lifecycle steps, one model per step, policy hook, cost guard (forked from autonomous-lab).
- lifecycle
- GROUND (find sources) → PLAN (design the test) → BUILD (run it) → VERIFY (check claims) → DELIVER (write the finding).
- cost guard
- Records every model request and compute run with its cost and identity; refuses work past a cap.
- policy hook
- The rule deciding each agent action: allow, defer, stage (held for a maintainer), deny.
- donated compute
- A contributor runs a proposal on their own model account and uploads the signed run for re-verification (v2).
- fiscal host
- A foundation that receives donations on behalf of a project without its own legal entity (e.g. Open Collective Europe).
- program slate
- The candidate programs Claude proposes across fields of science (manage.py generate_programs), each grounded in literature searches and scored on the rubric below; the full slate, chosen and not, is published in programs/_slate/<date>.json.
- impact
- Slate rubric, 1–5: how many people, or how much of the planet, benefits if the program's answer is yes.
- promise
- Slate rubric, 1–5: how likely the first question yields a real, publishable result.
- feasibility
- Slate rubric, 1–5: how well public data, AI agents and under $50 of compute can answer the first question.
- cost (slate)
- Slate rubric, 1–5: expected spend for the first three experiments (1 = cheap, 5 = expensive).
- slate score
- value ÷ cost × 3, where value = (impact + promise + feasibility) ÷ 3; value 5 at cost 3 scores 5. Top programs are seeded one per field.
- contributed compute
- A run executed by a contributor on their own model account through the MCP server; credited in tokens and self-reported dollars, never drawn from the pool.
- human-guided AI research
- Research in which AI agents run the experiments while people hold the decisions that matter: what to ask, what to pay for, and what to believe.
- maintainer
- (refined) An expert who steers a program: accepts proposals, reviews evidence, signs off findings under their own name.
- sign-off
- A maintainer's review of one finding, recorded with their name and date. Accepting a contributor's staged submission also counts as one.
- provisional finding
- A finding produced by an agent run that no maintainer has signed off yet. Its numbers still re-execute; its interpretation is unreviewed.
- imported record
- A finding that was produced before this platform existed and brought in as an archive; it has no run here and so no sign-off.
- proposal intake
- The form that sends a research question, a maintainer application or an organisation inquiry to a maintainer's queue; nothing sent through it is published.
- private project
- (pilot) A project commissioned by an organisation, open or closed at its choice, steered by an expert panel it selects.
- Proof Atlas
- The research program on making large formal Lean proofs navigable by people: https://moiseevigor.github.io/projects/proof-atlas/
- volunteer run
- Running an open task with your own coding agent: your agent pulls an open task over MCP, runs it on your account and machine, and submits the result. Re-executed in a sandbox before it counts; credited as volunteered work, never drawn from the money pool.
- crowd research
- Research that many people take part in, by money, by running open tasks with their own coding agent, and by reviewing; in the spirit of volunteer computing such as SETI@home and Folding@home. Volunteers keep control: a task runs only when they ask their agent to run one, under their own provider terms.
- tokens written
- Output tokens a model generated for a program. Headline token figure together with fresh input.
- tokens fresh read
- Input tokens read for the first time: uncached input plus cache writes.
- tokens re-read from cache
- Input tokens served from the prompt cache. Shown separately because they would inflate the total about 25 times.
- compute time volunteered
- Seconds a volunteer's own machine spent running Bistro tasks. Counted on its own, never added to money or tokens.
- non-reproduction rate (NRR)
- Share of published, computationally-checkable findings whose stated number does not re-execute to the stored value, on a fixed pre-declared corpus with a stated numeric tolerance. Headline metric of the launch strategy's evidence lane ([STRATEGY-LAUNCH.md](STRATEGY-LAUNCH.md) §4).
- claim pack
- The sale unit of a private project: findings where every number carries its stored script, its re-execution result, its provenance tier, its cost and a named sign-off.
- oracle position
- Being the independent party that checks someone else's results; structurally unavailable to a lab that produces them.
- non-dilutive
- Funding that costs no equity and no board seat: grants, prizes, provider credits, revenue.