Claims Boundary

Status: companion claims boundary for the proposed design specification, version 1.0, 2026-09-11.

The Animus-cycle specification and its frozen reference fixtures do not establish:

legal exclusivity over the words “Animus cycle”;
legal exclusivity over the proposed design name “Animus Omega Cycle”;
priority over checkpointing, event sourcing, deterministic replay, fixed-point constraints, self-consistency constraints, bounded-observer models, or state reconstruction;
that the complete architecture is scientifically or technically novel;
that naming the optional branch-reconvergence version “Animus Omega Cycle” establishes novelty, priority, implementation, or validation;
that a documented negative systematic search establishes the complete conjunction is absent from prior systems;
that Tests 01–04 establish an Animus cycle;
a Test 05 result;
physical recurrence or a cyclic physical universe;
that spatial torus topology creates temporal branches or forces them to reconverge;
that candidate enumeration, observer threads, an always-single trunk, branch deletion, or scripted equal outputs demonstrate represented branch reconvergence;
that branch-set reduction by itself establishes preservation of protected semantics, deterministic replay, or reciprocal closure;
that a successful branch-reconvergence fixture establishes that arbitrary branches can reconcile, that one history is physically real, or that physical alternatives cease to exist;
that “narrative collapse” describes quantum measurement, physical realities, or the destruction of universes;
consciousness, subjective continuity, or observer indistinguishability;
unrestricted predestination or information arriving from an unconstrained future;
entropy removal, information creation, or exact recovery after a lossy transformation;
general computational, memory, energy, or resource advantage;
that every ledger-free architecture must fail;
that provenance labels or authored-at metadata prove ending authorship;
that writer eligibility implies intention, awareness, or motive;
that a protected ledger alone establishes continuity through information loss; or
that a local draft has an OSF identifier, DOI, publication date, or Registration status.

The reference fixtures are executable teaching examples. Their PASS and FAIL values are conditional on their frozen candidate domain, contracts, reconstruction rules, observer model, interventions, and validator.

Any future reserved branch-reconvergence result is conditional on its prospectively time-locked fixtures, branch schema, transition table, narrative-equivalence projection, conflict rules, merge schedule, controls, thresholds, exclusions, and failure rules. Changing any of those after inspection of reserved outcomes creates a new protocol; it cannot rescue or reinterpret the original run.

Tests 01–04 remain separate retrospective studies with their original scopes, outcomes, deviations, and limitations. Test 03 remains unsupported. Test 04 Revision 1 remains aborted. Test 04 Revision 2 is limited to exact replay in its fixed deterministic model.