nucleation

TERM-055: operational availability, of a resource for an action: the chance that an agent–environment system, given the cue it actually has, deploys the resource for the task before the deadline

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Properties5
StatusActive
Tagsagency, cognition
Linedistributed-agency
Used byCLAIM-296 — What a system has, what it knows it has, and what it can deploy within a task's deadline are different, and the last is a relation among the resource, the agent, its environment, the task, the deadline and the cue, not a property of any one of them, CLAIM-306 — Under a deadline, search can establish presence by finding one item but absence only by exhausting the collection, so "If I can't find it, it isn't there" acts on an unfinished search as negation as failure acts on a finished one: a default stronger than either the closed-world assumption or negation as failure, safe only when the arrangement makes the full search finish within the deadline, CLAIM-312 — "If I can't find it, it isn't there" asserts operational unavailability, that the item will not be put to use before the deadline, not absence: a search that fails by the deadline establishes unavailability outright, and licenses absence only with a certificate that the unsearched remainder cannot hold the item, from exhaustion, from an invariant of the arrangement, or from a closed-world default, CLAIM-421 — The cessation of an organizational perspective's enactment need not imply the loss of the dispositions, capacities or reproductive relationships from which it can be reinstated: an interruption can be of activation (the disposition is held but not engaged or retrievable), of enactment (held, but the material, institutional or social conditions for exercising it are gone) or of reproduction (held by some bearers, but the processes that pass it on are damaged), and temporary unavailability is not extinction, though prolonged interruption of reproduction can end a tradition
ComplementsTERM-064 — legibility, of a distinction to an observer for a task: whether the observer, with the rules, categories and resources it actually has, can recover the distinction from what it is given and bring it to bear on the task; a relation among a representation, an observer's rule class, its resources and a task, bounded above by what the source makes possible for an ideal receiver, and directed, since what is legible to a governing institution and what of its governing is legible to others are different relations, TERM-085 — correctability, of an institutional arrangement for a corrective objective: the chance that the arrangement, starting from the description of the problem it actually has, finds, authorizes, coordinates and carries out a plan achieving the objective before the deadline and within its resources

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Definition

A17 §3: α_{q,τ}(x; a, e) = sup over procedures π available to agent a in environment e of P(retrieval of x under π takes at most τ, and π succeeds), for task q and deadline τ. A19 §4 added the cue actually supplied, q: α(x | q, M, a, e, τ), the probability of deploying x by τ given the request as made and the memory M as held. A23 §II.C uses that form.

Five things it is not, from A17 §1: physical presence; knowing that the resource is present; knowing where it is; deploying it in time (this term); and its still serving the purpose, since a resource deployed in time can be the wrong one.

What it must not be confused with

  • Usable information (CLAIM-199), which is about what a receiver’s rules can extract from a rendering. This is about acting, and includes the time the extraction takes.
  • Affordance (Gibson, LIT-1065, unread). A17: an affordance exists whether or not it is perceived; this is the chance it is realized in time.
  • Existence. The medic’s “If I can’t find it, it isn’t there” is α ≈ 0 read as absence. A16: “literally false as a claim about inventory, but potentially correct as an operational equivalence.”

Note of 2026-10-15: retrieval done before the request

Hutchins’s cockpit study (LIT-1066, read in NOTE-867) shows a factor this definition does not carry. The crew computes approach speeds 25–30 minutes before landing, at low workload, and sets bugs on the airspeed indicators; when the speeds are needed, reading them is “a judgment of spatial adjacency”. The environment supplies the cue (the displayed weight selects the card; the needle nearing a bug), and the work of retrieval is moved ahead of the deadline. α as defined starts the clock at the request. A system can raise α by doing retrieval earlier and leaving its result in the world, which the definition counts only through the environment term e. That is worth making explicit if the term is revised. The study is a task analysis, with no measurements and no failures, for an anticipated and invariant task, not a search for one item under a deadline as in CASE-085.

Note of 2026-10-15: the procedure chosen is not the best one

α takes the supremum over the procedures available. Gray and Fu (LIT-1058, read in NOTE-864) show that people do not pick the best procedure: they pick the cheapest, and a few hundred milliseconds of extra access cost was enough to shift them from perfect information on a display to memory. Realized deployment can therefore fall below α, as in CASE-085, where recall was tried before search.

Note of 2026-10-29: carried from a resource to a right

Herd and Moynihan’s Administrative Burden, LIT-1609, read in its introduction only (NOTE-1382), uses this term’s sense for a right. Burdens can restrict access to a benefit or a right with no change to formal eligibility, so that what is lost is the practical ability to use it: the right is present and known, and not deployable before the deadline. That is the separation of deployability from presence and from knowing it is present, applied to rights, as A8 proposed for CASE-172. Whether the book’s chapters give a measure of that loss is not known from this reading; take-up is the introduction’s only one. The term is unchanged.

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