Introduction
Substrate Engineering
The input-side discipline: strive for deterministic interpretation.
A substrate is a constraint specification S that restricts the interpretation space to IS(D) ⊆ I(D). Deterministic interpretation obtains exactly when |IS(D)| = 1: a single admissible reading remains.
When the space is a singleton and the canonical serialization is injective, independent models emit the byte-identical output, verifiable by SHA-256. Cross-model convergence is the empirical signature that the space collapsed.
# |I_S(D)| = 1, C injective sha256( C(model_A(D)) ) == sha256( C(model_B(D)) ) == # byte-identical sha256( C(model_C(D)) ) # = C(i*)