Evidence-Aware MapReduce for Forkable Compute

Abstract

Snapshot-backed sandboxes make branching cheap while leaving evidence dependence unchanged. Branches can reuse a model, prompt, repository, tests, observations, or execution ancestor, so counting outputs can amplify one repeated error into high-confidence consensus. We introduce an \emph{evidence-aware reduction contract}: each worker reports an estimate, estimated information, evidence identifiers, fork lineage, and execution metadata. For independent workers estimating one common parameter, we use standard inverse-information pooling in its Gaussian/Wald form. The fixed-dimensional numeric summary can merge in any tree order; evidence IDs and lineage follow separate rules. The residual $\Delta$ measures disagreement, becomes Cochran's $Q$ in the scalar inverse-variance case, and appears in the product integral. A reference implementation validates serialized records, rejects repeated nonempty evidence identifiers, carries evidence and lineage through tree reduction, and uses Cholesky-based numerical linear algebra. Unit tests and seeded synthetic checks exercise the algebra, unequal information, and forged precision; one four-worker named-snapshot trace exercises the end-to-end path. Platform logs document the exercised execution paths. A central open systems challenge is to turn evidence identity and fork lineage into a dependence model for correlated and adaptively selected AI branches.