# v0.6 Release Notes

## Purpose

v0.6 turns the engine into a deterministic recursive reasoning system that keeps next questions, decomposition, propagation, and confidence updates explicitly grounded in the situation graph.

## Capabilities added

- deterministic unknown selection explanations
- explicit ambiguity handling instead of silent tie-breaking
- comparability assessment before relationship reasoning
- relationship classification after comparability
- reasoning-stage progression after comparability answers
- graph-backed next questions via explicit unknown nodes
- investigation-strategy-based question formulation
- atomicity assessment for selected unknowns
- composite-unknown decomposition into child unknowns
- child-quality validation for decomposition outputs
- upward propagation from resolved children to parents and ancestors
- separation of evidence confidence, completeness, and conclusion confidence
- deterministic cross-branch corroboration, conflict, and duplicate-evidence handling
- developer-facing reasoning architecture documentation

## Reasoning pipeline summary

```text
Scenario
→ Reconstruction
→ Initial graph
→ Deterministic unknown selection
→ Question
→ Answer
→ Proposal
→ Proposal parsing / validation
→ Graph update
→ Reasoning-state rebuild
→ Comparability assessment
→ Relationship classification
→ Emergent unknown creation / reuse
→ Atomicity assessment
→ Optional decomposition
→ Propagation
→ Confidence / completeness / corroboration update
→ Next active unknown
→ Next question
```

## Core invariants

- every asked question must originate from an explicit unresolved unknown
- unknown selection is deterministic
- ambiguity is preserved explicitly when no justified distinction exists
- relationship reasoning cannot precede comparability
- parent nodes cannot resolve before completion rules are met
- confidence cannot outrun completeness
- duplicate evidence cannot increase confidence
- conflicting evidence caps conclusion confidence
- cross-branch corroboration only counts for distinct branches with distinct evidence keys
- the LLM proposes updates but does not mutate the graph directly

## What v0.6 proved

- graph-backed questioning works better when every justified next question maps to an explicit unresolved node
- broad unknowns can be decomposed deterministically before direct questioning
- resolved child evidence can be propagated upward without prematurely resolving parent reasoning
- confidence becomes easier to reason about when evidence quality, completeness, and conclusion strength are separated
- deterministic cross-branch corroboration can improve support without double-counting repeated evidence

## Known limitations

- sibling selection still depends on the existing deterministic scorer and may choose a justified next branch that is not always the intuitively expected one
- cross-branch corroboration is limited to direct child branches of the same parent
- no multi-hop corroboration exists across unrelated subtrees
- reasoning remains bounded to explicitly represented graph structure and user-provided answers

## Deliberate exclusions

- no persistence
- no autonomous exploration
- no probabilistic reasoning
- no Bayesian reasoning
- no semantic embeddings
- no expert mode
- no multi-hop corroboration across unrelated subtrees
- no heavy graph visualisation

## Next experimental question

`Can the engine preserve and reuse successful reasoning structures across separate cases without turning prior experience into unquestioned assumptions?`