tropical-semiring jets — tropical (min,+)

five jets for (min,+) semiring operations. optimization, assignment, decoding. no separate nox instantiation — tropical operations decompose to existing patterns (branch + lt). jets accelerate common compositions.

proved via Assayer (tropical witness-verify) in zheng.

jets

# name input → output pure cost jet cost primary workload
0 trop_matmul (min,+) matrices A, B → C = A⊗B O(n³) branch+lt O(n³) tmin tropical matrix power
1 trop_shortest graph, source → distances O(E×log(V)) branch+lt O(E×log(V)) tmin single-source shortest path
2 trop_hungarian cost matrix → assignment + cost O(n³) branch+lt O(n³) tmin optimal assignment
3 trop_viterbi HMM, observations → state sequence O(S²×T) branch+lt O(S²×T) tmin optimal sequence decoding
4 trop_transport μ, ν, cost matrix → transport plan O(n³×log(n)) O(n³×log(n)) tmin optimal transport
5 witness_commit tropical witness → F_p Lens commitment O( witness )

execution vs proof cost

tropical jets do NOT reduce execution cost (same asymptotic). they reduce PROOF cost: the jet produces a structured witness (assignment + cost + dual certificate) that zheng verifies in O(|problem|) F_p constraints instead of proving every comparison step.

without jet: every min(a,b) = branch(lt(a,b), a, b) = ~10 F_p constraints
             1000-step shortest path over 100 nodes = ~10⁹ F_p constraints

with jet:    tropical computation produces witness
             zheng verifies: validity + cost + dual certificate
             total: O(|V| + |E|) F_p constraints

cross-algebra

tropical witness commits via Brakedown (Brakedown) at the boundary:

tropical-semiring computation → witness (assignment, cost, dual certificate)
  ↓
witness_commit boundary jet: Brakedown.commit(witness) → F_p commitment
  ↓
zheng verification in F_p (structural + cost + optimality checks)

hardware mapping

  • all comparisons → lut (lookup table for branch+lt composition)

lens

Assayer: Tropical (witness-verify protocol, delegates commitment to Brakedown)

Dimensions

lens/specs/tropical-semiring
tropical PCS the (min,+) PCS backend for zheng. optimization workloads (shortest path, assignment, Viterbi, transport) prove natively through their algebraic structure. the tropical semiring has no additive inverse — min(a,b) cannot be undone — so the PCS delegates commitment to Brakedown (PCS₁)…
lens/reference/tropical-semiring
trop/docs/explanation/tropical-semiring
the tropical semiring: min replaces + the tropical semiring replaces addition with min and multiplication with ordinary addition. the result is an algebraic structure that encodes optimization — shortest paths, minimum cost flows, scheduling — as linear algebra. trop exists because this encoding…

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