certificate-audited-analysis

Note: the crate paths, documents, and measured numbers below are illustrations from the aurora-agent workspace where these methods were developed and tested. The methods themselves apply to any computational analysis whose numbers get published.

Certificate-audited analysis

A number without a verifiable receipt is a rumor with formatting. The workspace's rule — no optimized output is published without a certificate — generalizes to any analysis: every result you cite should come with a self-describing record of its inputs, its omissions, and a digest that lets someone else check it without trusting you or re-running your engine.

Never trust a compile without verifying its certificate

The workspace's compiler emits a Context Certificate with every compiled context, and the verification path is independent of the engine: ContextCertificate::verify recomputes the digest over the canonical body and returns Valid, DigestMismatch { claimed, recomputed }, or Malformed (crates/section/src/certificate.rs). Before citing any certified result:

1. Verify the certificate, and record which of the three states you got. Malformed and DigestMismatch are findings, not inconveniences to route around.
2. Check that the numbers you are about to quote appear in the certified body, not in prose near it.
3. Check the limitations array and carry it forward — the golden reference certificate's limitation ("dependency reachability and protected tags; it does not yet implement ... formal influence bounds") bounds every claim built on it.

The same discipline applies to reproduction: the workspace's reproduction-check contract (docs/EVALUATION_REPRODUCTION_CHECK.md) certifies each declared output as matched, diverged, or missing, reports first_divergence as the earliest non-matching row rather than an aggregate match rate, and keeps missing separate — so a rerun cannot improve its apparent match rate by omitting a required artifact.

Omission accounting is the object of review