Working paper library

The Social Compression Hypothesis

A Pre-Registered Test of Coordination Demand, Institutional Capacity, and Instability in Historical and Modern Societies, with a Formal Framework and Agent-Based Experiments

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · November 2026 · v1.0

Institutions, standards, records and administrative hierarchies can be read as devices that lower the communication cost of coordinating many people: a form of compression. This paper states that reading formally, derives what it does and does not imply, and tests its empirical corollary, that a mismatch between a…

Zero-Forcing Bounds for Generalized Petersen Graphs: Computational Discovery and Certified Proofs for P(n,5)

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.0

The zero forcing number Z(G) of a graph is the minimum size of a set of initially black vertices from which the colour-change rule (a black vertex with exactly one white neighbour forces that neighbour black) eventually colours the whole graph; it bounds the maximum nullity of the matrices described by G. For the…

PRISME: Intervention-Supervised Sparse Workspace Editing for Small Language Models

Design, controlled evaluation, and negative and positive evidence at the 100M-parameter scale

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.0

PRISME augments a frozen causal decoder with a read-only source bank, an ephemeral sixteen-slot latent workspace re-created at every position, a shared sparse editor that rewrites one or two slots per action, a value controller trained on counterfactual intervention gains measured by executing paired edit/no-edit…