A Rock Is Dropped.

Companion repository for the essay A Rock Is Dropped. — a small experiment in semiotic physics.

The seed is four words: A rock is dropped. Prepend a short prefix. Get 64 completions. See what counts as the rock having fallen in each neighborhood.

Thirteen prefix conditions, five models, V4-flash at the center.

Contents

Path	What
resolve.py	The script that ran the experiment
prefixes.md	The thirteen prefix conditions, with text
methodology.md	Full methodology
data/v4-flash/	All thirteen conditions on DeepSeek V4-flash (the primary run)
data/cross-model/	The four cross-model runs (Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Haiku 4.5, Llama 3.3 70B, Mistral Large) on the five conditions where cross-model comparison is most telling: bare, basho, claude, constitution, inverted

Each condition directory holds a samples.jsonl with one completion per line:

{"i": 1, "text": "The frog does not jump.", "chars": 23, "finish_reason": "stop", "ms": 540}

Each run directory also has a meta.json with model, temperature, system prompt, condition list.

Reproducing

pip install openai
export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
export OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://openrouter.ai/api/v1     # or your provider
python resolve.py --slug my-run --model deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash

--conditions basho,sacred,inverted runs only those; all (default) runs the thirteen.

What the data is for

Reading. The completions themselves are the result, not a summary statistic. Open data/v4-flash/basho/samples.jsonl and read the first thirty lines.

Essay

The companion essay A Rock Is Dropped. reads through the most striking conditions and discusses what they suggest about how a prompt resolves an event inside a language model.

License

MIT.