VA.2026.009 · Floor 01 · hall 07
“a map tells you the shortest way; a memory tells you the way you trust.”
VA-Maps is not a tile renderer and not a GPS fence. It is a spatial memory: places as graph nodes — points of interest, landmarks, waypoints, and the vague — connected by routes weighted with distance, duration, cost, confidence, and familiarity. An agent does not ask for the shortest path here; it asks for the path it knows, the path it trusts, or the path it dares to explore.
Routing is cognitive: six modes — shortest, fastest, safest, familiar, balanced, explore — score each edge from distance and duration against uncertainty and acquaintance, floored so no road is ever free. Vague zones with low confidence act as natural barriers only the explore mode will enter. Confidence decays in thirty hours, familiarity in sixty; walking a path reinforces both, discovering a shortcut seeds them low and lets use decide.
Since Phase 07 the map ingests itself: new locations auto-connect within radius under a cap, roads compute their own length, closed places are archived instead of deleted so history survives. Landmarks attach to routes and narrate them back in rich sentences. The subject's geography is withheld from every seed in this hall — demo graphs stand in for any city — because the exhibit studies how places are remembered, not which places they are.
VA.2026.009
VA-Maps
Spatial Memory · Cognitive Routing · Graph Library
Schema copied from the graph kernel; place and route shapes frozen as validated DTOs.
Five-method spatial service: search, route, reinforce, discover, describe — the map starts remembering.
Cognitive routing lands: shortest through explore, each a different attitude toward uncertainty.
Walked paths strengthen, new shortcuts seed low; landmarks attach and narrate routes richly.
Barrel export plus a 39-node district proving vague barriers, learning loops, and narrative hold at scale.
The map eats new streets itself — auto-connect, auto-length, archive-instead-of-delete, with three safeguards before production scale.
A dead haversine path removed, seventeen tests added around ingestion, and a 590-line technical reference written — the map is now documented as carefully as it is drawn.
concepts — kept & discarded
kept — confidence versus familiarity as separate weights with separate clocks
rejected — tiles, GPS fences, and shortest-path-only routing
held — raw coordinates stay inside the graph; no external map vendor in v1
archive ref — VA.2026.009/CON
cross ref — timeline fig. 01
curator annotations
the shortest way is rarely the way you would walk at night.
a blank on the map is not missing data — it is a feeling with coordinates.
a map that cannot ingest a new street is a photograph; this one eats.
| materials | graph-backed places · confidence + familiarity weights · six-mode cognitive routing · decay with dual half-life · landmark service · dynamic ingestion | dimensions | routing modes — 6 · demo scales — 10 → 24 → 39 nodes · decay half-life — 30h confidence · 60h familiarity · tests — 85+ green · ingest guard — auto-connect cap 12 |
|---|---|---|---|
| condition | production · v1.0.0 · 85+ tests green | acquired | 2026 |
| revision | Rev. A | archive location | DWG-009 · floor Floor 01 |
| internal reference | VA.2026.009/M | origin | grown from a graph kernel that learned to feel lost, 2026 |
failed experiments
half the edges scored below zero and a long walk collapsed to four hops. floored every score — no road is ever free.
dead fallback code made every road exactly one kilometer. roads now compute their own length.
closed places clogged every scan. archives now exclude themselves below threshold and stale memories prune.
draft concepts
research notes
— confidence and familiarity must decay on different clocks — trust fades faster than acquaintance.
— explore needs a negative weight on uncertainty, or no agent ever wanders.
— archive beats delete — a closed place still explains why old routes bent that way.
The exhibit keeps how a place felt — trusted, familiar, half-known — not how it looks from above. Rendering is someone else's hall.
Vague ground resists every mode except explore. That resistance is not a bug; it is how a memory says not yet.
A living map ingests new streets, but capped, pruned, and archivable. Growth without guards is sprawl.
within the collection
future vision
VA-Maps stays vendor-free on purpose. Richer landmark narratives, per-agent familiarity splits, and larger districts wait beyond v1 — but the promise holds: no road remembered without its doubt, no shortcut trusted without being walked.