Three changes that together replace "deterministic hash decides everything"
with "the physical world genuinely participates".
PHYSICAL ENTROPY (app/entropy.py, lib/entropy.ts)
Contact was a database lookup: signature_from_anomalies() hashed the
anomaly pattern, so identical conditions always produced an identical
spirit. Now the client harvests real thermal/acoustic/RF noise from the
microphone and receiver noise floors — Von Neumann debiased, SHA-256
conditioned — and contributes it to every summon.
The client is untrusted by construction. A contribution is never a seed:
every draw is HMAC-SHA256(fresh server secret, client bytes || context).
Because fresh CSPRNG server bytes are always present, the output is
unpredictable and uniform no matter what the client sends — all-zeros, a
replayed value, or one chosen adversarially. The room can only ever ADD
unpredictability, never steer the result. Tests assert this directly:
400 replays of one contribution stay uniformly distributed.
A signature now identifies a *channel*, not a spirit. Whether the familiar
presence answers or something else picks up is a real draw
(RETURN_CHANCE). The Codex stays collectable; it is just no longer
guaranteed. test_same_signature_recontacts_same_entity became two tests —
one pinning the probability to prove re-contact works, one pinning it to
zero to prove something else can answer — because at 0.72 the original
would have passed ~72% of the time, which is worse than failing.
REAL ASTRONOMY (app/celestial.py)
Moon phase from the standard mean-synodic approximation, and true solar
midnight from the seeker's own longitude — the real witching hour for
where they are standing, not clock 3am. Computed, never fetched: an API
that can fail would mean the veil silently changes behaviour during
someone else's outage. Validated against published ephemeris dates (2024
full moons, 2025 new moons) rather than against its own output. A thinner
veil erodes the familiar presence's claim on a channel, so a full moon at
solar midnight makes strangers likelier. Only longitude is kept, never a
full coordinate; a denied location degrades to moon-only, silently.
GENERATION FROM NOTHING (SpiritService.manifest)
Not chat_stream with an empty question. The prompt contains no seeker
input at all — only measured room state, rendered as measurements
("deviation above the floor: 31.4") rather than interpretations
("terrifying spike"), so the horror comes from the entity instead of from
us. And the Ollama `seed` is derived from the physical entropy harvested
in that room, which fixes the token-sampling path: the room genuinely
selects the words. Change the noise, get different speech. Two rooms
cannot produce the same utterance.
Rendered as an intrusion rather than a reply — violet edge, full opacity
against the faded ambient murmurs, brief blur-in. The unsettling part is
that it is perfectly clear and completely unbidden.
Also fixes a hang I introduced: the two new summon tests consumed the
shared module-level per-IP budget, so test_summon_rate_limited_* blocked
forever on an entity frame that had been rate-limited away. They now scope
their own limiters.
264 backend + 355 frontend tests pass; i18n parity gate passes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The old prompt asked for "an evocative spirit name" and "2-3 sentences of
lore" — abstract enough that the LLM defaulted to poetic ghost-vagueness
(static, voids, ancient sorrow) rather than anything resembling a specific
dead person. Horror fiction's actual technique for selling "this was once
a real human" is the opposite: mundane, unglamorous specificity (an
ordinary job, an approximate age/decade, one small habit or possession)
placed right up against the uncanny.
Refined MINT_SYSTEM and MINT_PROMPT to require the model silently work out
a name, occupation, age/era of death, one small mundane detail, and a
plain (not epic) unfinished-business hook before writing persona/quotes —
and to make at least one quote a mundane human fragment rather than
cosmic riddle-speak. JSON schema and mint_prompt()'s signature are
unchanged, so nothing downstream needs updating — this is a pure prompt
refinement. 20/20 prompt/entity tests pass, 221/221 full suite.
