Abstract. A Kardling card is a 384 × 576 PNG whose top sixteen pixel rows carry, byte for byte, a canonical dossier: a living-seed genome sealed by its maker (a few hundred bytes of recipe for a scorecard mind) and a chain of events — issue, give, receipt, skin — each signed by the key entitled to it and linked by SHA-256 to the one before. The face below the band is drawn from the dossier’s facts by an integer-only art engine, so any reader can redraw it and refuse a card whose picture differs by a pixel. The mind is grown on the holder’s device from real records, judged on cases it never grew on, and changes only by levels that anyone holding the same bytes can re-run. Ownership is settled by an ordered, replayable registry; minds fuse only into cards that beat both parents; and owned cards couple into a mesh whose ledger credits each owner by measured contribution. Every claim the drop makes in public passes a claim gate that re-runs it.
1 · The problem
A typical digital collectible owns a pointer: a token naming a picture on a server. A typical AI product rents answers: records go out to a model someone else runs. Both separate the thing of value from the person who holds it. A Kardling card puts the value — a working mind, its ownership and its proofs — inside the object the holder keeps.
2 · The card
The band begins with the magic DG1 and a three-byte length, then the dossier’s UTF-8 bytes, then black to the end of the band (18,426 bytes of room). The face is paintArt(facts, theme, 384, 560): id, title, dataset, department, stage, rarity, generation and parents decide the creature, the frame and the marks. Writing is stored-deflate and deterministic; reading accepts any valid PNG of the right shape, so an editor’s re-compression still opens, and checks every chunk’s CRC before the pixels are read.
3 · The life
The genome is opened under its maker’s seal first (verify before parse). The issue must be signed by that maker; every later event by the owner of that moment — whoever the last give names. Each event names the hash of the one before, so nothing can be dropped, reordered or re-wrapped; each is signed over its one canonical byte form, so nothing can be altered.
4 · The mind
The genome carries recipes, not weights: for each department it knows, which columns, which quantile cuts, which direction and which weights make a scorecard of at most six rules (seed-library’s ribosome). Expressed on a ground, the cuts are read off its FIT rows; the mind must clear its genome’s bar (0.6 AUC) on GATE or it is cut and abstains. TEST rows are never fitted or selected on by anything in the build; only the sealed organs read them. A genesis card carries the mind its search found in fixed form, so expressing it takes milliseconds and gives the same bytes on every device.
5 · Levels
A level is a new search (seeded from the card’s life, so every card searches its own way) whose mind beats the current one by at least 0.002 on GATE. The receipt carries the found mind, the search, the ground’s hash and both scores in millionths. Re-running it re-expresses both minds and demands the same numbers; a deep re-run repeats the search and demands the same mind. A registry records a level only once it has re-run it, so a self-signed fake level reads as a card but never counts.
6 · Fusion
Within a department, the parents’ rule shapes are crossed rule by rule and, half the time, mutated once; across two departments of one business, the fused card carries both minds and a coupling learned on GATE. The owner, who must hold both, tries up to twelve fusions and seals the first fused card that beats both parents on GATE, naming both — or nothing. Cards on different grounds share no cases to judge a fused card on, so that is refused.
7 · Ownership
A chain of signatures proves what a card is but not what it is not: an owner can sign one life to two receivers. The registry is an append-only log of lives, each entry linked to the one before; the first recorded give wins, a forked life is refused at the event where it parts, one serial per maker, and replay() re-records every entry from nothing and demands the same entry back.
8 · The mesh and its credits
Cards of one business join a mesh by their owner’s consent for their current life, if they answer and lead a coin on GATE with a paired-bootstrap bound above zero. The best-proven card per department is fielded; scores — never records — are coupled by non-negative stacking learned on GATE. Each member’s share is its out-of-fold leave-one-out contribution as a part of a million; jobs credit owners cases × share in a hash-chained ledger that replays from the shares. Credits are accounting, not money.
9 · The drop
Every department of six public datasets was a candidate; a department was admitted if four of its first eight genesis searches cleared the bar; serials went to admitted departments in turn; every search, live or cut, is recorded. Decoder #0001 carries the best genesis mind and a drop receipt naming the hash of the frozen decoder files and the head of the genesis log. Its re-run replays the log from nothing and hashes the decoder.
10 · The claim gate
Public posts may claim only verified, owned, grown, offline, level, fused (its code name is born), mesh or drop — each re-run by a checker at posting time — and every number in a post must be one a claim just re-ran. A post never says a Kardling is self-aware, conscious or alive, never promises, and never mentions money.
11 · The kit
A card’s slots are read off its checked dossier — two node slots, a third at stage 1, a fourth at stage 3, and two tool slots — so every card ever issued has them and no card’s bytes change. A loadout is signed by the owner for the card and every node as they stand. The kitted mind is the Kardling and its nodes, coupled by non-negative stacking on GATE and judged out of fold; a node joins only if it answers, covers a department nothing fielded covers, and leads a coin with a paired-bootstrap bound above zero. A tool is an app item: one of the estate’s mintable apps, exactly as mint-an-app’s vendored records hold it, carrying the commit and the CI run that proved it; it moves no score.
12 · The arena and the raids
A duel is agreed by both owners: a challenge and an acceptance, each signed for a card as it stands and the hash of its loadout. The batch is 64 GATE rows ordered by the hash of both signed records, so neither side chooses it; each kitted mind is weighed on the GATE rows outside the batch and scored on it; the higher AUC wins; the receipt re-runs. A raid boss is a department of the drop’s admission record that no genesis search took past the bar; a strike is one search from a seed the striker’s key and number fix, carried with the mind it found, re-checked in milliseconds. A world boss is a whole business at its best lone genesis search plus 0.010; a party strike is a mesh of consenting owners’ cards, and its receipt names each fielded card, its owner and its share in millionths. Nothing is staked.
13 · Builds and the shrink
A build is a recipe of cards for one business. Measured, its parts are fielded by the party’s join rule without consents — a measurement needs nobody’s leave: each must answer and beat a coin on GATE with a paired-bootstrap bound above zero, and the best-proven card fields each set of departments, the rest benched by name. The fielded parts are coupled by non-negative stacking, and the build’s GATE AUC is judged out of fold over four folds, as is each part’s alone, so the lift — the build less its best part — compares like with like. A lift of +0.005 or more is a combo, −0.005 or less an anti-combo, anything between plain; a receipt is proven when two distinct keys sign re-runs of it that measure exactly the same, and the first of them found it. The shrink distils a build into one card: the teacher is the fielded parts coupled on FIT alone, its yes or no cut to FIT’s own share of yeses; a search on one department chooses rules by how well they give the teacher’s answers; the student, re-expressed on the true answers like any card, is kept only if its GATE beats its best source’s by 0.002. Organ 16 measures, on 80 builds and 20 shrinks of the drop’s cards, whether either holds on TEST, and sets every student beside the same search run on the true answers.
14 · What was measured
Seventeen organs, each sealed before it was measured (several are not fully blind — dry-run, or their kernel gated, before the seal, and each says so; see Proof), are in Proof, with every rule’s verdict read live from the committed records — the ones that failed included. Not everything held. One example: the shop’s TEST cases are its holiday months, and its minds rank them less well than the months they were judged on — the shop-context department’s median TEST AUC fell under the 0.6 bar its cards cleared on GATE. That result is kept as sealed, not tuned away. Another: organ 16 found combos that hold — 61 of 68 found on GATE beat their best card on TEST — and a shrink whose teacher did not help: in 18 of 20, the same search on the true answers did better than the student the build taught.
15 · Limits
The minds are small by design: readable, fast and provable, not the most accurate models one could fit; pooled gradient-boosted trees beat them in dex-frontier’s measurements. A level is adopted on GATE, and how it holds on TEST is measured, not assumed. The registry’s keeper decides only the order of arrivals. The drop on this page is sealed with a public demo key; the real drop is sealed by its owner’s own key.
16 · Credits
Powered by the Konomi architecture, created by Thomas Frumkin. Built on living-seed (genome, germination, gate, card primitives), dex-frontier (departments, coupling, statistics), seed-library (the ribosome) and PixelWhisperer Kards (the art engine) — all in the estate, vendored byte for byte.
The Kardlings game draws on the Guided Entropy Principle (GEP) of Gary W. Floyd, Lumiea Systems Research Division — ThunderStruck Service LLC (New Caney, Texas), published as Open Defensive Prior Art (Creative Commons):
- Gary W. Floyd, Lumiea Systems Research Division — ThunderStruck Service LLC — “From GEP Stabilization to Dual-Map Ethical Reasoning: A derivation of positive ethical evidence, negative ethical evidence, and non-legal moral reasoning,” Derivation v0.2. A stable system can stabilize a wrong reference — so every mind here is proved on cases it never grew on, every level is checked again on cases it never saw (organ 3 found that a level’s gain does not carry on average: his point, measured), every claim is a receipt that can say no, and one claim that does not hold blocks a post.
- Gary W. Floyd, Lumiea Systems Research Division — ThunderStruck Service LLC — “The Laws of Entropy-Time: Rewriting Thermodynamics with the Guided Entropy Principle,” February 2026. Every claim marked derived or predictive, each with the test that could fail it — the organs’ sealed properties and predictions.
- Gary W. Floyd, Lumiea Systems Research Division — ThunderStruck Service LLC — “Dream State Architecture: GEP-Guided Memory Consolidation and Entropy Regulation in Artificial Consciousness Systems,” 2025. Work done while you are away stays inert until a wake review validates it — “Work overnight” keeps a level only once it has re-run.
- Gary W. Floyd, Lumiea Systems Research Division — ThunderStruck Service LLC — “NEXUS — Distributed Synthetic Intelligence: Architecture, Ethics, and the GEP-Native Mind,” 2026. Intelligence distributed across specialist organs — the mesh of owned Kardlings, each department’s records kept with their owner.