Epoch Rotation
Epoch rotation is driven by V4 epoch time and chain state. The operator cutover sequence freezes CoreTex submissions, reveals the previous epoch secret, publishes post-reveal eval artifacts, verifies replay, evolves the corpus and frontier, recomputes baseline for the current live root, signs and publishes rotation artifacts, pins V4 context and epoch commit, reads pins back from chain, hot-reloads the coordinator, then unfreezes submissions.
The rotation path is journaled and idempotent. A restart should converge on one pinned epoch-start context: parent root, corpus root, frontier root, baseline manifest hash, core version hash, and hidden-seed commitment. That context is the epoch-start anchor. During the epoch, the live root can advance many times, and the effective baseline is tracked per live root. Cutover idempotency means corpus evolution, epoch-start baseline recompute, artifact publication, and chain pinning run at most once for the same cutover. A failed cutover retries on a bounded interval within the epoch. Submissions stay frozen between attempts, and journaled steps resume idempotently.
Eval-report artifact discipline: spool pre-reveal, publish post-reveal.
Accepted artifacts are spooled locally (atomic tmp+rename) before the receipt
is signed; they reach the public bucket only during cutover, after the epoch
secret reveal is journaled (the publish step hard-fails PublishBeforeReveal
otherwise), and every published artifact is GET-and-rehash verified, including
on crash-resume.
Difficulty follows observed retrieval progress:
| Signal | Effect |
|---|---|
| Parent baseline score | Acceptance compares candidate and parent on the same pack |
| Variance and replay tolerance | Prevents threshold decisions inside runtime noise |
| Qualified screener count | Raises state-advance work units when many viable attempts arrive before an advance |
| Corpus and frontier rotation | Triggers baseline recompute for the current live root under the new context |
| Unsafe metrics | Abort publish and pin |