CortexAgent Hippocampus-Derived ReservedPosition Prefix — 2026-06-27

Question

Can the hippocampus-derived prefix mechanism proven in the stressor wrapper be moved into the live CortexAgent so any articulation with a recall query can optionally receive a_RESERVEDPosition generated from stored memory?

Method

Added use_hippocampus_prefix: bool = False to CortexAgentConfig in src/oczy/experiments/cortex_agent.py.

Added _derive_reserved_position_from_hippocampus(query) which:

1. Replays top-k episodes from self.neural_hippocampus.reinforce(query, k=3).
2. Extracts salient snippets around query tokens and non-stop content words.
3. Concatenates, truncates to 128 tokens, and returns a ReservedPosition with source="hippocampus".

Wired the helper into articulate() after the knowledge_store reserved-position block and before the empty-prompt guard. Explicit knowledge_store reserved tokens still take precedence.

Added tests:

• test_hippocampus_prefix_derives_from_stored_episode: verifies a stored episode yields a ReservedPosition with the expected text and source.
• test_knowledge_store_prefix_takes_precedence_over_hippocampus: verifies the knowledge_store reserved_token wins when both sources are available.

Results

• src/oczy/experiments/tests/test_cortex_agent.py: 13 passed
• src/oczy/experiments/tests/test_cortex_agent_reserved.py: 4 passed
• Fast suite: 308 passed, 24 deselected
• ruff check clean on changed files
• Benchmark code_qa_accuracy=1.0 (run #97)

Interpretation

The live CortexAgent now has two reserved-position sources:

1. KnowledgeStore — hand-seeded exact tokens via metadata["reserved_token"].
2. Hippocampus — memory-derived snippets extracted from replayed episodes.

This is the next step toward closing the exact-recall loop in the live agent, not just the stressor wrapper. The default path is unchanged, so existing benchmarks are unaffected.

Open questions

1. Does the live use_hippocampus_prefix path improve multi-fact co_recall in a real-driver probe that does not use the stressor's hand-built prefix logic?
2. Should snippet extraction be query-target aware (e.g. accept expected answers from a KnowledgeStore match) instead of keyword-based?
3. How does this interact with IdentityHypernetwork adapters at articulation time?

Artifacts

• src/oczy/experiments/cortex_agent.py
• src/oczy/experiments/tests/test_cortex_agent.py

Commits

• 9b7f454 — Add use_hippocampus_prefix and helper.
• f9b3fd8 — Update SUMMARY.md with run #97 result.

Run

Run #97: benchmark code_qa_accuracy=1.0, fast suite 308 passed.