Bridge-Burners · a proposed visual standard · v0.1

AI·ML Topology Notation.

Networking has Cisco's icon language — a router, a switch, a firewall each have a canonical symbol you can wire into a diagram everyone reads the same way. Interpretability has nothing like it. This is a first attempt at that standard: a consistent glyph for each component we built this session, one visual grammar, honest tiering baked in. Made up, but made to be legible.

solid frame = verified / real component dashed frame = proposed / SPEC (not measured) color = layer: architecture · lens · geometry · numeric/hw · method

ARCHITECTURE

Residual Stream

the carrier bus; every block reads/writes it

Transformer Block

attn + MLP sub-blocks, 2 residual adds

Attention Head

Q·Kᵀ softmax · V, causal

MLP

expand 4× · GELU · project back

LayerNorm

re-center/scale; stays high precision

Softmax

logits → next-token distribution

LENSES · readout probes

Logit Lens

unembed with ASSUMED identity transport

J-Lens (J-junction)

unembed through MEASURED Jacobian Jₗ

K-Lens

tangent-rotation probe; lights the jump

GEOMETRY

Curvature Basin

the gap well; κr² bowl

The Gap

dark region the lens can't read (A→B)

Trust Radius

where linear readout stays valid

Tangent

touch-and-leave; the linear approx

MECHANISM · proposed

ExcitronSPEC

a state falling into the basin

Memristor LatchSPEC

frozen weight; retained, re-writable

NUMERIC · HARDWARE

Quantizer

precision ladder fp64→fp16→int8

MXFP4 Block

32× 4-bit E2M1 + 1 shared scale

Tensor Core

4-bit multiply → fp32 accumulate (Blackwell)

METHOD

Witness Function

honest check; catches overclaims incl. its own

Example topology — the session stack, wired

how to read the topology: the residual stream (cyan bus) runs left→right. a transformer block reads and writes it; its weight matmuls are fed as MXFP4, executed on a tensor core (4-bit → fp32 accumulate). a J-lens taps the stream to read the token. at one point the gap opens into a basin; an excitron falls in (dashed = SPEC, proposed not measured). the readout is the next-token distribution. the witness watches the whole diagram — every claim gets verified.
honest status: this is a proposed notation, not an adopted standard — AI doesn't have one yet, so this is one attempt at the grammar. the components marked solid were built and verified this session; the dashed ones (excitron, memristor latch) are hypotheses rendered as symbols, not measured properties. offline, static SVG.