Negative and null results

The Economic Geography of Digital Retail Supply: Product Diversity, Regional Specialization, and the Hidden Structure of Quebec's Online Economy

Evidence from 390,108 product listings of 1,569 Quebec online stores across 17 administrative regions (Fabri-Ka snapshot, 1 November 2026)

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

Can product-level online catalogues reveal the spatial organisation, diversity and specialization of a regional retail economy beyond what business counts show? This paper studies one read-only snapshot (1 November 2026) of Fabri-Ka, an aggregator of the public catalogues of 1,569 Quebec-based online stores (390,108…

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…

Beyond the Square-Root Barrier: Automated Discovery of Algebraic and Algorithmic Shortcuts in Bitcoin Cryptography

A hypothesis-driven, reproducible study of secp256k1, ECDSA, BIP340 Schnorr and SHA-256 with machine-checked identities and controlled negative results

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

Bitcoin's security rests on the elliptic-curve discrete-logarithm problem on secp256k1, on SHA-256, and on the ECDSA and BIP340 Schnorr signature schemes. The generic cost of the discrete logarithm, Θ(√n), is a theorem in the generic-group model; the curve's unusual structure, a special prime, j-invariant 0 and…

TITAN-MoE: Topology-Aware and Predictive Expert Orchestration for Distributed Mixture-of-Experts Inference on Apple Silicon

A Measured Systems Study on a Heterogeneous Mac Cluster

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · November 2026 · v0.1

Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models touch only a few experts per token, so a model whose weights exceed a machine's memory can still be served if the right experts are in the right place at the right time. This preliminary working paper reports the design, implementation and measurement of TITAN-MoE, an…

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…

Can Autonomous AI Agents Discover the Fundamental Value of Real Estate? Evidence from Quebec Transactions and Multi-Agent Deliberation

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

Committees of role-specialised language-model agents that debate before answering are increasingly proposed as valuation tools. This paper asks whether the debate adds information. In a preregistered experiment on 631,866 arm's-length residential sales registered in Quebec between 2021 and 2026, evaluated under a…