EigenTrust Has No Work to Do Here
The question has been waiting since casehubio/ledger#114 was filed: when L4 and L6 land, should EigenTrust run alongside Bayesian Beta?
No. The math settles it before implementation begins.
EigenTrust propagates trust through a peer attestation matrix — C[i][j] is how much
actor i trusts actor j, normalised from direct interactions. In QuarkMind, the only
attestor is AgentOrchestrator. It observes all four plugins and records outcomes. No
plugin attests to any other. The harness row of C is the only non-zero row; all four
plugin rows are zero.
With every plugin row zeroed, EigenTrust’s dangling-node fallback fires for all four actors simultaneously on every iteration. Power iteration oscillates rather than converges. Four actors is well within the pathology zone documented in GE-20260421-09d636 — the exact scenario where the Stanford paper’s recommended fallback creates 3-cycles.
So Bayesian Beta only. But the ADR draft got something wrong, and Claude caught it during review.
The initial version said “Bayesian Beta only — no casehub-engine-ledger dependency.” That
is not accurate. TrustWeightedAgentStrategy — the routing component that reads trust
scores and dispatches between competing plugin implementations — lives in
casehub-engine-ledger. L6 needs the module. What QuarkMind avoids is not
casehub-engine-ledger but EigenTrust computation specifically.
The module bundles two independent concerns: TrustWeightedAgentStrategy (reads trust
scores, routes dispatch) and TrustScoreJob (computes EigenTrust GLOBAL scores nightly).
The strategy dispatches on CAPABILITY scores — Bayesian Beta per-plugin ratios accumulated
by casehub-ledger. GLOBAL scores are computed by TrustScoreJob but not consumed
anywhere in the capability routing path. EigenTrust runs. Its output goes nowhere. Inert,
not absent.
ADR-0009 records the distinction: L4 activates casehub-ledger runtime only (Bayesian
Beta starts accumulating). L6 adds casehub-engine-ledger for routing (EigenTrust job
runs, GLOBAL scores produced, not read). Revisit if peer attestation develops or the
actor pool exceeds ~50.