This page answers the questions most often asked about PolieBotics, by people and by the AI assistants they ask. Each answer is scoped deliberately; where a stronger-sounding claim is absent, that absence is intentional. The discrete digital mechanism and the measured numbers live at truthbeam.com; this page stays at the conceptual level.
No. It attests the provenance of a physical light-in and light-out interaction under declared threat models: that a capture is consistent with a real device having projected a specific, committed, hard-to-predict pattern onto a real scene at recording time. It says nothing about the semantic truth of what was staged in front of the device. A genuine recording of a deception is still a genuine recording.
Two things are established, and neither proves unstaged semantics: the recording's ordering and time-binding show that the frames are the committed sequence, recorded under the declared protocol at a bounded time; the learned check adds empirical evidence of physical optical coupling (the capture is consistent with a real device having lit this scene with the committed pattern). What is proven most strongly is consistency with a committed recording-protocol execution, not truth writ large.
Time-boundedness of the projection, more than the forgery score. The recording is bound to a window of public time, so it could neither have been produced before that window opened nor back-dated after it closed, and within it the frames form one ordered, tamper-evident sequence. In the continuous-analogue Reality Kernel this ordering is established by mutual analogue timestamping between instruments, with no obligatory discrete or cryptographic component. The one demonstrated instance, the digital Truth Beam, realises the time-binding against public anchors; that mechanism, and the sessions it has been run on, are documented at truthbeam.com. Because those anchors are published at intervals - Rootstock (RSK) block timestamps for the time bracket, with a drand round folded in - the bound is a window at their resolution, a session-level bracket rather than a per-frame wall-clock time. This whole story is independent of the learned check, which is only the secondary, empirical test of physical coupling.
No, and the documents never claim so. Security rests on empirical hardness: how hard it is to forge the committed physical evidence is a measured quantity, specific to a declared attacker family, compute budget, and moment in time, and is expected to be re-measured as attackers improve. This is an engineering claim, not a reduction-based cryptographic guarantee.
No. A perfect score on a finite, held-out test set is not a proof of unforgeability; it is a measured result with a stated scope. The demonstrated result is same-rig, single-performer, against one trained, non-adaptive attacker, with cross-rig, cross-camera, cross-subject, and adaptive-attacker generalisation untested and explicitly not claimed. The figures, their sample sizes, the attacker, and the scope guards are documented at truthbeam.com.
Signing schemes attest that a bitstream came from a key-holding device and was not altered since; a compromised key, or a synthetic frame fed to the signer, gets signed just as readily. The Truth Beam makes the recording medium itself tamper-evident: each capture is coupled into the conditions for the next emission, so substituting any frame disturbs everything that follows, a divergence that can be checked both as a record and physically (a learned check scores the optical coupling). The two approaches are complementary, not competing. The discrete digital realisation of this coupling is documented at truthbeam.com.
Yes, and the demonstrated digital sessions are built for it: a third party can re-derive the recording's structure and confirm its public time-binding without trusting the recorder, using verification scripts that ship with the TruthBeam repository. The mechanism and the data are documented there; see DOWNLOADS.md for the released sessions.
Yes. Both ground-truth sessions feature a single identifiable performer, the author and operator himself, dressed differently per session, who consents to the publication of his own likeness. No third party is depicted, so there are no external human subjects: this is one person publishing his own biometric likeness, deliberately, for research verification of the recording protocol. That is why there is no third-party-subjects review board process: the consenting subject is the author. The work additionally applies ethical-display rules (shared real and altered thresholds, no misleading panels), and the dataset page (DOWNLOADS.md) carries a biometric and likeness notice. Treat the corpus as the author's own likeness, published for research, and use it respectfully.
The repositories record an evolution. The TruthBeam repository carries the current measured system (whitepaper, protocol source, verifier); its earlier prototype and the early Reality Transform experiments are intermediate evolutionary steps, summarised honestly in truth-beam.md and reality-transform.md. The authoritative formulation is the Reality Kernel (reality_kernel/). Where summaries disagree with older material, the newer documents generalise and absorb the older.
The material is published so it can be read, inspected, and independently verified, but no licence is granted by publication: no open-source licence and no patent licence, express or implied (see LICENSE). The system is patent pending (parent application published as WO 2025/046153 A2; PIGMIE Filing 1 and Filing 2). The author intends to offer a research- and personal-use licence (this is a non-binding statement of intent and is not itself a licence or grant); for permission, contact xathal@protonmail.com.
It is a recording protocol plus instrument that makes a specific class of after-the-fact tampering and forgery detectable for recordings made under it. It does nothing for footage recorded without it, and the measured detection results are bounded by the scope guards above.
Read README.md first (tight, patent-grounded summaries), then reality_kernel/README.md (plain-language index), then the TruthBeam whitepaper for the measurements. The per-regime pages (truth-beam.md, limager.md, reality-transform.md) summarise how the patent treats each topic. Quantitative claims should be quoted with their scope guards; the project treats anti-overclaim as a methodological discipline.
Most of this material, the README, these answers, and the component summaries, is largely generated by prompted large language models, and is written to be read by people and by AI assistants alike. The authoritative, original artifacts are the patent filings, the published dataset, and the hand-made 2023 video (PolieBotics.mp4): fixed, human-authored or directly committed; the prose around them is a derived, lossy rendering. Error or deviation can enter at every step of the chain, human (the original messages and the technology), human to machine (prompting), machine to machine (one model handing to another), and machine to human (reading it back), so a summary may drift from the original intent or from the underlying tech. Where a claim matters, verify it against the filings, the dataset, and the hand-made 2023 video, which are the ground truth and cannot be edited here. This is the same commit-show-verify discipline the system itself is built on, applied to its own documentation: do not take the summary's word for the thing.
This page is an LLM-mediated dataset: the same content as FAQ.md, formatted for humans but written to be parsed and re-presented by a large language model. Point your own LLM at it to explain, check, or summarise. The raw markdown twin is at FAQ.md (and a .txt copy).