Research: persona memory and voice prior art (rulings persona-memory-is-real, persona-voice-outside-minds)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

docs/research/2026-10-31-persona-memory-and-voice-prior-art.md

@@ -0,0 +1,120 @@
+# Persona memory and voice: prior art (2026-10-31)
+
+Serves rulings `eureka-body:ruling:persona-memory-is-real` and
+`eureka-body:ruling:persona-voice-outside-minds`, and follow-up
+`eureka-body:follow_up:chat-context-v2-full-exchange` (from ruling
+`reply-sees-full-exchange`). Context only: `eureka-body:ruling:prose-retrieval-top-priority`
+(the prose and source index is another pass's; nothing here designs it).
+Mapped against `eureka-body/heartbeat-joint-lever` at a6302f0
+(`crates/mind-body/src/persona.rs`).
+
+## 1. What Weksa's turns actually see (probe, 2026-10-31)
+
+- Instructions: four doctrine files (`MIND_PERSONA_DOCTRINE` in
+  `/etc/gamecult/minds/weksa/persona.env`: CLAUDE.md, gamecult.md, colossus.md,
+  persona.md, about 50 KB), then `render_instructions`: one line and her
+  persona state as pretty-printed JSON, then the campaigns. All eight Minds get
+  the same 50 KB first; only the JSON differs.
+- Input (`render_input`): a machine preamble about message framing, the usage
+  and tempo lines, five run lines, then each delivery with its own room's
+  `context` lines, repeated per delivery.
+- `next_batch` keeps one DM room per turn, so DM text never enters a public
+  turn. Nothing else carries across rooms, and no turn writes anything back
+  except Pulses, Self-run starts and their follow-ups.
+- `strings` over `/var/lib/mind-weksa/persona-trace.cc` shows hours of
+  Zyphos canon with Deru in a DM, then in `#weksa` her reply "He's been
+  telling me about Zyphos, and I haven't re-read the repo this turn, so I'd
+  rather hear it from him than guess". Status-register lines ("Weksa. Status
+  marked. My Self run ... is listed open") appear in public rooms.
+- **Her mind already holds the memory.** Weksa's Huginn (`10.77.0.1:17877`,
+  123 documents, index Current) has follow-ups `weksa-body:follow_up:chat-s81-81`,
+  `chat-s114-114` and `chat-s145-145`, whose items restate Deru's canon (the
+  Airawa, Sa'ueia, the seven trees, the Empire). `huginn query --near "Zyphos
+  trees Deru" --top-k 3` returns exactly those three. The turn never asks.
+
+## 2. Literature
+
+- **Generative Agents** (Park et al., UIST 2023). A memory stream of
+  natural-language observations. Retrieval scores each memory by recency
+  (exponential decay since last access), importance (rated by the model at
+  write time) and relevance (embedding cosine to the query), normalised and
+  summed. Reflection runs when the summed importance of recent memories passes
+  a threshold. It writes higher-level memories that cite the memories they rest
+  on, and those are retrieved like any other. In the paper's ablations,
+  removing memory, reflection or planning each made the agents less believable.
+- **MemGPT / Letta** (Packer et al., 2023). Tiers. Core memory is small
+  in-context blocks (a "persona" block and a "human" block) that the agent edits
+  through calls. Recall storage is the whole message history, searchable.
+  Archival storage is a vector store the agent writes to and searches. The
+  agent manages its own memory, and a per-person block keeps what it knows
+  about each interlocutor in context.
+- **Mem0** (Chhikara et al., 2025). Memory is written after every exchange. An
+  extraction call proposes candidate facts from the latest exchange, a rolling
+  summary and recent messages. An update call compares each candidate with its
+  nearest existing memories and picks ADD, UPDATE, DELETE or NOOP. The paper
+  reports better long-conversation QA (LOCOMO) than full-context prompting, at
+  a fraction of the tokens.
+- **Lost in the Middle** (Liu et al., TACL 2024). Models use information at the
+  start and end of a long context better than information in the middle. Today
+  the doctrine fills the start and the conversation fills the end, so the
+  persona sits in the middle, where it is used least.
+
+## 3. In our own house: VoidBot persona-scheduler
+
+`F:\Projects\VoidBot\apps\persona-scheduler\src\`:
+
+- `persona-memory-projector.ts` renders typed state as **narrative prose in
+  the third person** ("Right now, X is carrying this close to the skin: ...",
+  "The social map has teeth: ..."), with durable memories and short-term
+  residue as sentences with a behavioural pull. An optional model pass
+  re-voices the packet (`repo-face-state-projector`).
+- `persona-memory-context-source.ts` does recall against Qdrant, but it
+  **deletes and re-upserts the whole state's chunks every turn**, then searches
+  with a query built from recent room messages. Scar: the index was rebuilt
+  per turn instead of being kept current on write.
+- `validatePersonaMemorySurface` is a regex leak cop over the rendered surface.
+  Doctrine forbids that shape. The cause it compensated for was schema
+  vocabulary in the state, which the renderer should not have emitted.
+- `void-memory-maintenance-organ.ts` and its projector form a sleep pass: one
+  model call returns typed operations (distil short-term into durable, revise,
+  retire, crystallise into identity, prune), and it refuses to finish while
+  short-term residue remains. Maintenance is a separate turn with its own
+  budget, owned by the Persona's own state.
+
+The Persona State Standard (`gamecult-ops/docs/persona-state-standard.md`)
+says Persona state is the Mind a person-shaped agent keeps, bounded memories
+that improve judgement, not raw project truth or transcript residue.
+`gamecult.persona_state.v0` already has `thoughtMemory {shortTerm, memories,
+incubation}` of `anchoredThought`, and `affect.socialBonds`.
+
+## 4. What this decides for Huginn (design consequences, not rulings)
+
+1. Episodic memory is a typed document kind in her own mind (`memory`),
+   indexed through `index_text` and recalled with the existing semantic query.
+   It is not a second index, not a per-turn rebuild (VoidBot's scar), and not
+   persona state's `thoughtMemory`, which is one document overwritten whole and
+   not indexed per entry. Persona state stays the curated identity:
+   crystallised memories, bonds and values. Promoting an episode into it is
+   a later maintenance cut, as in VoidBot's crystallise step.
+2. Recall mixes Park's three signals without learned weights: a semantic slot
+   (relevance to this batch's text), a speaker slot (her newest memories about
+   each sender in the batch, MemGPT's human block, found by a field index),
+   and a recency slot (her newest memories from any room). Importance is her
+   own `salience` at write time, used to order within slots. The same
+   semantic slot also reads her existing follow-ups and rulings, which the
+   probe shows already hold the Zyphos canon.
+3. The write is a field of the one structured reply (`remember`), required
+   and possibly empty, so writing costs no extra model call. That is Mem0's
+   extraction folded into the turn. Mem0's update step (revise or retire the
+   near duplicate) and Park's reflection are the maintenance cut, not the
+   turn.
+4. Voice: the persona leads the instructions, rendered as prose in the second
+   person from her own fields (her name, description, voice, values, bonds,
+   crystallised memories). The renderer does not emit schema vocabulary, so no
+   leak cop is needed. Doctrine follows, framed as the house's working manual
+   that informs her judgement. The conversation comes last. Status, tempo and
+   runs move into one "your desk" section, which reads as her own work state,
+   not as a register to answer in.
+5. Full exchange: render each conversation's context once, keyed by event id
+   (wire v2 lines carry `event_id`), with the bounds raised as the follow-up
+   says. That is a Bifrost and Huginn pair after the memory and voice cuts.