Research-Stack/5-Applications/hutter_prize/DETERMINISM_POLICY.md

Determinism Policy

Public-facing builders should be deterministic unless they explicitly declare otherwise.

For this repo, that means:

• rerunning the same public builder with the same inputs should produce the same bytes
• nonessential timestamps should be excluded from public manifests
• nonessential absolute paths should be excluded from public manifests
• deterministic fingerprints should be preferred over fresh run markers

Why This Matters

This project leans heavily on one-way artifacts:

• hashes
• manifests
• review packets
• public prep bundles

If those drift without a good reason, trust drops fast.

Current Scope

This policy currently applies most directly to:

• scripts/build_review_packet.py
• scripts/prepare_public_artifact.py

Those builders are expected to be byte-stable on rerun for the same inputs.

Verification Tool

The reference verifier is:

• scripts/verify_builder_determinism.py

That script rebuilds a bundle twice in separate temporary directories and checks whether the relative output files hash to the same values.

Explicit Exceptions

Not every artifact in the repo is expected to be deterministic in this way.

Benchmark and experiment outputs may legitimately contain:

• timing measurements
• run stamps
• observation-time receipts

Those are observational artifacts, not stable publication bundles.

Working Rule

If a builder is meant for public handoff or archival packaging, assume it should be deterministic until proven otherwise.