Coherence: A Machine-Comparable Quality Gate for Agent Decisions and Payments — with an x402 Ecosystem Census (2026-11-03) and a Citation Catalog Mapping Observed Search Queries to ScriptMasterLabs Resources
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This record contains three works by Timothy Walton (Script Master Labs LLC, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business — UEI G24VZA4RLMK3, CAGE 21U51), all measurements the author's own, on his own systems, with proof payments labeled SELF-PROOF. (1) Working paper — "Coherence: A Machine-Comparable Quality Gate for Agent Decisions and Payments." AI agents now act on information from other agents and pay for those actions through machine-payment protocols such as x402 — with no standard way to score how strongly independent checks agree that an action should proceed. The paper defines coherence, a single deterministic number — |Σ w·d| / Σ w over votes from genuinely independent evaluation paths, gated at a stated threshold — and reports three live measured instances: a payment gate on Arc mainnet (coherence 0.8125, 2026-10-25), the PRO-LO v3.1 trade-signal feed (recorded read 0.9047, four independent paths, gate ≥ 0.6), and ClaimGate's fact-check verdict rule (SUPPORTED only at coherence ≥ 0.80 across at least two independent source families, with verbatim quotes machine-verified against fetched text). The central claim is narrow: agreement is meaningful only when the agreeing paths are independent, and syndicated or duplicated evidence must be counted once or the number is fiction. (2) Companion dataset — "An x402 Ecosystem Census, Read 2026-11-03" (CSV + README). A one-day census of the x402 discovery ecosystem, read end-to-end on 2026-11-03 by full-pagination unauthenticated reads of each index's public discovery endpoint: the author's own indexes (OMNIGATE, 129 resources; the 402Proof sidecar, 14 rows at the morning probe and 20 after a same-day listing fix), two third-party indexes holding strictly-attributed rows for the author (Coinbase CDP Bazaar: 177 strict rows in a catalog that read 107,465–109,238 resources during the day; PayAI: 70 strict rows of 15,153), one index where the author's 55 previously verified rows had lapsed to zero (Ultravioleta DAO, 1,761 total), a failure-mode audit of all 241 unique listed resources (224, or 93%, answering a clean parseable 402), and a 15-service settlement-proof pass labeled SELF-PROOF. Presence is not demand; no count here measures outside payers. Counting rules are documented in the README. (3) Citation catalog — "Mapping Observed Search Queries to ScriptMasterLabs Resources." Search queries that generated impressions for scriptmasterlabs.com in a Google Search Console historical snapshot (observed 2026-09-10 to 2026-10-09 via Windsor.ai, retrieved 2026-10-12), each mapped to the first-party ScriptMasterLabs product, MCP server, x402 API, or published field guide that honestly answers it. Queries that cannot be honestly associated with ScriptMasterLabs offerings are omitted. It documents, with the underlying impression and position data, how observed search intent aligns with the infrastructure described in the working paper.
Author: Walton, Timothy
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225622825
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