tines/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-10-16-tines-design.md

tines — opportunistic shared memory for mostly-offline robots

Design document. 2026-10-16.

Intent

Small robots doing their work collect facts about the world. They are mostly offline. When two of them happen to be in range, they should swap what they know so that each robot's picture of the world improves over time. No robot depends on receiving anything — it can do its job on its own observations — but there is no reason not to share.

tines is the library that does this: a store of timestamped observations, a belief layer derived from them, and a delay-tolerant exchange protocol that runs over whatever radio or link the robot has.

The name is from Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep: the Tines only form a mind when close enough to hear each other.

Goals

• A robot's knowledge is a monotonically growing set of observations; meeting another robot can only add to it.
• Any two robots holding the same set of observations have identical storage, regardless of the order or path by which they got them.
• Exchange is opportunistic, session-free, and tolerant of being cut off at any byte. A half-finished exchange leaves both sides valid.
• The same core code runs on a Jetson-class Linux robot, an MCU-class robot, and inside a simulator, with only the transport and storage adapters differing.
• The semantics of an observation's payload are opaque to storage and transport. Only the memory layer interprets payloads, and the interpretation can change without touching stored data.

Non-goals

• Guaranteed or timely delivery to any particular node. There is no "destination"; every node is a sink.
• Routing, custody transfer, or any multi-hop forwarding logic beyond "I carry what I have and give it to whoever I meet". Classic Bundle Protocol (RFC 9171) routing and custody are explicitly not in scope.
• Consensus. Robots may hold different beliefs about the same topic; that is acceptable and expected.
• Security, authentication, or encryption in v1. Observer IDs are asserted, not proven. (Noted as future work; the ID scheme should not preclude signing later.)
• Defining the observation payload schema. That is the application's problem; tines ships a byte-string payload and a topic key.

Anti-goals

Things that would make this a failure even if it technically works:

• Sync behaviour that depends on contact order (robot A ends up with a different store depending on whether it met B or C first).
• A core crate that silently requires an allocator, std, threads, or a filesystem, making the MCU target an afterthought.
• A memory layer that must be synced, or whose state cannot be rebuilt from storage alone.
• Exchange that requires a reliable, ordered, long-lived connection.

Constraints (decided)

• Language: Rust.
• Targets: Jetson-class Linux (primary), MCU-class (no_std, likely no allocator), and an in-process simulator for development and test.
• Core crate is no_std. alloc is an optional feature. Storage and transport are traits; the core contains no I/O.
• PHY-agnostic. The core never sees a radio. It sees a transport trait (below). Adapters exist outside the core.
• Observations are opaque, timestamped, observer-attributed, and keyed by topic. The payload shape is deliberately undecided (one candidate is a timestamped RSO observation; it does not matter to this design).

Architecture

Three layers, each a separate concern, top to bottom:

 ┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
 │ memory      — "my priors": beliefs per   │  derived, local, never synced
 │               topic, computed from       │
 │               storage under a policy     │
 ├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ storage     — append-only log of raw     │  synced by set-union
 │               observations; local        │
 │               trimming policy            │
 ├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ comms       — contact-driven exchange    │  PHY-agnostic; transport
 │               of observations            │  trait + adapters
 └──────────────────────────────────────────┘

Only observations cross the wire. Memory is a pure function of storage plus a policy.

Observation (the unit of everything)

Observation {
    id:        ObservationId   // content-derived hash of the fields below
    observer:  NodeId          // who saw it
    time:      Timestamp       // when they saw it (observer's clock)
    topic:     Topic           // key for grouping/trimming, e.g. "door/3"
    payload:   bytes           // opaque to tines
}

Decisions:

• id is a hash over (observer, time, topic, payload). Two robots that observe the same thing produce two observations; de-duplication is by identity, not by meaning. Union is therefore idempotent and order-independent.
• time is the observer's local clock. tines does not attempt clock sync. Cross-observer recency comparison is a memory-layer policy question and must tolerate skew.
• topic is a short byte string. Its structure (hierarchy, separators) is application-defined but tines supports prefix matching for trimming and queries.
• Observations are immutable. There is no update or delete at the protocol level — only local trimming.
• Fixed upper bounds on topic and payload length are a core configuration constant so the MCU target can use fixed-size buffers. (My call: 64 bytes topic, 1 KiB payload default; configurable at compile time.)

Storage layer

Responsibilities: hold observations, answer "do you have X", enumerate what's held, enforce a local trimming policy.

trait Store {
    fn insert(&mut self, obs: &Observation) -> Result<Inserted, StoreError>;
    fn contains(&self, id: &ObservationId) -> bool;
    fn get(&self, id: &ObservationId) -> Option<Observation>;
    fn ids(&self) -> impl Iterator<Item = ObservationId>;
    fn by_topic(&self, prefix: &[u8]) -> impl Iterator<Item = Observation>;
    fn trim(&mut self, policy: &TrimPolicy) -> usize;
}

Decisions:

• Storage is append-only from the protocol's point of view. trim is the only removal and is purely local.
• Trimming is policy, not semantics: keep the last N per topic, drop older than T, stay under B bytes. Trimming never merges or rewrites observations.
• A trimmed observation may be re-received from a peer later. (My call: accept it; the trim policy will drop it again. Keeping a tombstone set to refuse re-receipt is a possible later optimisation, bounded in size, and must not be required for correctness.)
• Implementations: SQLite-backed (Jetson), flash ring buffer or fixed-size table (MCU), in-memory (simulator and tests). The core ships the in-memory one.

Memory layer

Responsibilities: answer "what do I believe about topic X" by folding the relevant observations under a policy.

trait BeliefPolicy<B> {
    fn fold(&self, me: NodeId, obs: impl Iterator<Item = Observation>) -> B;
}

Decisions:

• Memory is derived. It can be a cache, but it must be rebuildable from storage at any time and is never transmitted.
• Policies are pluggable. Examples the application might implement: most recent wins; own observations outrank others'; per-observer trust weights; observation-count thresholds; a confidence that decays with age. tines ships a LatestWins and a SelfFirst policy as references; anything that needs to parse the payload belongs to the application.
• Memory is where disagreement between observations is handled. Storage never resolves conflicts.

Communications layer

Responsibilities: notice a peer, find out what the peer has that we lack (and vice versa), transfer it, survive being interrupted.

Transport trait (the PHY boundary)

trait Transport {
    type Addr;
    fn poll(&mut self) -> Option<Event<Self::Addr>>;   // Contact(addr) | Lost(addr) | Frame(addr, bytes)
    fn send(&mut self, to: &Self::Addr, frame: &[u8]) -> Result<(), SendError>;
    fn mtu(&self) -> usize;
}

Decisions:

• Datagram semantics, unreliable, unordered, bounded size. Everything above assumes frames can be lost or duplicated.
• The core is driven by polling (poll / send) so it fits both a bare-metal superloop and an async runtime via a thin shim. (My call: no async in the core.)
• Contact detection is the transport's job (beacon heard, link up, sim says "in range"). The core reacts to Contact and Lost.
• Adapters planned: UDP broadcast/unicast over ad-hoc Wi-Fi (Jetson), serial-attached LoRa/packet radio, in-process simulator.

Exchange protocol

On Contact(peer), both sides run the same symmetric procedure; neither is the initiator in any semantic sense.

1. Summarise. Send a compact summary of held observation IDs.
2. Diff. On receiving the peer's summary, compute which held IDs the peer appears to lack and send those observations.
3. Repeat while the contact lasts, re-summarising periodically so observations received from a third party mid-contact also propagate.

Decisions:

• Every message is self-contained and idempotent. Receiving the same observation twice is a no-op; receiving a summary out of order is harmless. There is no session state that must survive to keep the store consistent.
• Summaries must fit in a small number of frames even when the store is large. (My call: an inverted Bloom filter / IBLT-style structure or a per-topic-prefix hash tree; the builder picks, with the requirement that a false "peer has it" costs only a delayed propagation, never an inconsistency.)
• Observations are sent smallest-first or oldest-first? (My call: prioritise the peer's probable interest if the application supplies a priority function; otherwise newest-first, on the theory that short contacts should carry the freshest data.)
• Fragmentation: observations may exceed MTU on narrow radios. The core fragments and reassembles; a partially received observation is discarded, never stored.
• Rate: the core emits at most one frame per poll so the application controls pacing and duty cycle.

Simulator

A std crate wrapping the core with:

• N nodes, each with its own store and clock skew.
• A contact model: positions and ranges over time, or an explicit contact-trace file.
• A loss/duplication model per link.
• Assertions: after the trace, every pair of nodes that were ever transitively connected hold the same store (modulo trimming); no node's store depends on contact order.

The simulator is also the test harness for the protocol.

Crate layout (my call)

tines/
  tines-core/      no_std; Observation, Store trait, Transport trait,
                   BeliefPolicy trait, exchange state machine,
                   in-memory Store, reference policies
  tines-sim/       std; simulator, contact traces, property tests
  tines-udp/       std; UDP adapter (Jetson)
  tines-serial/    no_std-compatible; framed serial adapter
  tines-sqlite/    std; SQLite Store
  tines-cli/       std; inspect a store, replay a trace, run a node

Left to the builder

• Hash function for ObservationId (should be cheap on MCU; BLAKE2s or SipHash-128 are reasonable).
• Summary data structure and its parameters.
• Wire encoding (postcard or a hand-rolled fixed layout; must be no_std).
• Fragment header layout and reassembly timeout.
• SQLite schema.
• MCU flash store layout (can be a stub in v1 as long as the trait boundary is honoured).

Open questions (not blocking)

• Payload schema. Deliberately out of scope; an RSO observation is one candidate.
• Whether topics should carry a schema/version tag so the memory layer can skip payloads it cannot parse. (Leaning yes, as a convention in the topic string rather than a protocol field.)
• Observer authentication (signing). Out of scope for v1; the ID hash should be chosen so a signature can be appended without changing the ID.