Mind · Strategy
Bubble
Sandboxed coordination trial with rollback on commit refusal
Definition
Mechanism
Isolated sandbox where coordination is tried before committing to reality. Creator sends BUBBLE_CREATE: {participants, ttl (time-to-live), isolation_level, parent_bubble (for nesting)}. Participants JOIN to enter isolated context. Inside bubble: state changes are copy-on-write (snapshot isolation), resource acquisitions are soft-reservations (intent, not actual), messages to non-participants are queued (not sent). Work proceeds normally but nothing affects real world. When ready, creator calls PREPARE (2-phase commit). Each participant responds READY (can commit) or ABORT (cannot). If ALL READY: COMMIT—queued messages sent, state changes applied atomically, reservations converted to hard acquisitions. If ANY ABORT or TTL expires: ROLLBACK—all tentative work discarded silently, no compensation needed. Nested bubbles commit to parent context, not real world; parent commit makes all nested work real. It enforces a ConstraintFirst approach around the simulation context to ensure no side effects leak into the production environment.
Preconditions
- Group of agents
- Shared context
Postconditions
- Bubble dissolved or merged
- Local consensus reached
Invariants
- Information within bubble is isolated from outside
- Internal consistency maintained
Risks
Failure modes
Participant crashes after READY but before COMMIT (blocking—use timeout and recovery).
Long-running bubbles hold soft-reservations too long (resource starvation).
State snapshot becomes stale (external world changed during bubble).
Nested bubble complexity (multiple isolation levels, commit ordering).
Commit overhead (2PC protocol is expensive).
Bubble escape (agent accidentally affects real world from inside bubble—discipline required).
Relationships
Builds on
References
Defining boundaries before content
Infrastructure
System condition at time T
Infrastructure
The application of effort to reduce entropy
Nothing in this library builds on this pattern yet.
Reference
