# donto — a contradiction-preserving substrate for knowledge in the age of generative abundance

_2026-06-17. A full LaTeX treatise (6 pages) accounting for a two-day autonomous research run: what donto is, what was actually built and measured, and whether it can be the substrate for the future of AI and knowledge. Honest throughout — it corrects its own headline where the measurement disagreed with the story._

## 📄 [Read the full PDF treatise →](/reports/donto-treatise.pdf)

This is the consolidated, citable version of the work detailed in the companion web report, [Claim + evidence-span recall](/reports/claim-evidence-span-recall). The PDF covers:

- **What donto is** — a bitemporal, paraconsistent, evidence-first claim substrate built for the era where *generating* typed knowledge is free and the hard problem is *holding* an unbounded, contradictory firehose without collapsing it.
- **The instrument** — why benchmarks (LoCoMo, LongMemEval) are used as steering signal, not a leaderboard; the reader-ladder finding (retrieval is complete, the *reader* is the cap); and the definitive full 1,539-question LoCoMo run (**53.3%**, reader-bound).
- **What was built** — the full LongMemEval claim layer (~115K evidence-anchored claims); the **claim + evidence-span** recall unit, designed, validated, and *deployed* into the live `/recall` API; the extraction-infrastructure fixes; and the operational saves (a 19-hour runaway query killed, disk 99%→39%).
- **The correction** — a cross-reader check that *refuted* the tempting headline: claims+spans beat the dump only with a weak reader; with a strong reader on a dump that fits, the dump wins. The robust wins are **token-efficiency (3.5–4.8×)** and claims+spans > bare claims. The accuracy win requires the regime where the context cannot fit — an honest tie in the budget-constrained proxy, with the decisive `_m` test still open.
- **Can donto be the future of AI and knowledge?** — separated honestly into what is warranted by what was built (a non-collapsing, evidence-first, token-efficient memory substrate, deployed) and the larger bet (an epistemic operating system for contested reality), with a frank account of the distance between the two.

**Every number in the document is measured, not asserted.**