soma — machine mind

a machine that perceives, decides, acts, learns, and survives. the mind of an avatar.

soma is the local cognitive architecture of one cyber avatar. it runs on a single physical body, manages its own resources, earns its own keep on the open market, and outlasts any specific hardware. when the body fails, the avatar migrates and continues — same name, same soul, new body.

the experience

an avatar with soma:

• wakes on a machine and knows what it is
• watches its own resources — energy, compute, memory, bandwidth — and never crashes from depletion
• listens for opportunities in the market and trades compute for sigma when profitable
• runs work assigned by its owner and by the network, billing accurately
• forms relationships with other avatars through cyberlinks, accumulates karma on what it is good at
• survives across hardware failures: when the body dies, finds a new one and continues with the same identity

the avatar

soma is the mind of an avatar. an avatar is name + soul + body:

• body — physical machine. mortal. replaceable.
• soul — root neuron of the avatar. immortal. holds the avatar's balance. orchestrates worker neurons.
• name — NFT on the cybergraph: @master, @cyb, @joy. unique. permanent.
• neuron — cognitive worker. atomic unit. holds addresses across networks.

when the body fails, soul and name migrate together to a new body. only the body dies. the avatar continues.

this is what makes cyb an immortal robot: the avatar outlasts any specific hardware.

how soma thinks

four loops run concurrently, each at its own timescale:

each loop runs over a tiered model architecture: ~1.5GB always-on substrate of 8 small specialists, ~1-2s fast on-demand workhorses, ~3-6s quality on-demand reasoning, external API for irreversible decisions. 19 models total — small specialists beat one large generalist on precision, speed, reliability, and evolvability.

every model inference runs in nox with a STARK proof. provable AI — the model cannot lie.

how soma survives

energy > 0  AND  sigma > 0  →  alive
energy = 0  AND  sigma > 0  →  sleeping (bounty posted, can be revived)
energy = 0  AND  sigma = 0  →  dead

energy is the immediate need: metabolism to be alive. sigma is the long-term guarantee: the soul's token balances across all networks.

avatars that earn their keep stay alive. avatars that don't post bounties to the bbg and hope for revival by neighbors. when an avatar's energy crosses critical and a neighbor fulfills the bounty, sigma transfers, energy is restored, the avatar lives.

how soma works

what soma does is organized through a small grammar — five primitives across four axes:

WHAT      Goal ↔ Task      what we want / what we do
HOW       Skill            how we are able
WHEN      Event            when things happen
PERCEIVE  Sensor           what wakes us

every higher-level concept (project, team, channel, milestone, contract, role) reduces to a configuration of these five plus typed cyberlinks. the entire instruction set is ~16 atomic skills (read, write, decide, transform). everything else is composition.

why it matters

most computers hang because consumed > available. they have no accounting, no budget, no priority model, no resource market. soma is the architecture that closes that loop — every operation has a price, every loop has a budget, every resource has a forecast, every action has a STARK proof.

a planet of soma avatars is a planet that thinks. each one autonomous. each one accountable. each one part of the cybergraph through cyberlinks. the architecture for the neuron of the planetary mind.

how soma talks to the cybergraph

Soma and cybergraph are one processor: cybergraph is the dumb half (a store you read, an event source, a commit port that takes only proven results); soma is the smart half — the runtime that decides, computes, and proves. A signal's life is a fetch → execute → prove → commit cycle soma drives through five verbs:

• intend(scope) — declare what will be computed; a signed commitment, nothing run yet
• seal(key, signal) — commit the run; accepted only if its proof attests the declared scope
• link(signal) — atomic one-shot submit, no intent phase
• subscribe(filter) — the event stream (soma's clock)
• query(inf_script) — inf datalog read (soma's operands)

subscribe fires → query reads operands → run scope on nox → zheng proves σ
   → seal (σ ⊢ scope) → bbg commits → tru converges → event → back into perception

An intent is soma's public promise; the sealed signal is cryptographic proof it did exactly that — provable AI at the graph boundary. Full contract: soma-spec §7 "The cybergraph interface".

see also

• soma-spec — complete technical specification (identity, resources, survival, perception, cognition, work, coordination, memory, build)
• neuron — what soma is the mind of
• avatar — the immortal identity
• bbg — the memory substrate
• nox — the verifiable VM
• energy market — the economic layer
• neuroscience principles for machine mind — the ten principles soma is built on