Posture-conditioned reasoner
A language-model reasoner instructed to decide as one declared judicial posture while receiving the same verified legal substrate, gate schema and record as every other member of its panel, so that differences among panel members reflect posture rather than legal inputs.
First used in Ariadne's Thread
In the Ariadne design, the posture lives only in a profile appended to otherwise identical inputs; no reasoner retrieves its own law. Each reasoner scores a gate on a constrained scale with a one-line rationale, or records a declared decline-to-reach.
Whether a model can hold genuinely distinct postures over the same correct law is the central empirical risk. Research on persona effects, and on frontier models behaving as rigid formalist judges, suggests a panel may collapse into one persona under several labels, which would push Z toward zero whatever the case.
In the paper's logged smoke test, all reasoners were prompt-conditioned profiles of a single underlying model. On that engineered fixture they did not collapse, which demonstrates mechanics, not validity.