Week 12: Capstone Protocol

A joint review of the whole semester's method, and the containment or warding protocol it all points to — a design task, not a recital.

Turning a semester of method into a protocol for a case no one has observed yet.

10 May 2027

Open the slides

Outline#

• the method, walked in the order it was built rather than recited as a list: observe under protocol (week 1) → classify against the four categories, non-exclusively (week 2) → read a candidate countermeasure as a falsifiable claim (week 3) → apply that under the safety protocol (week 4) → write the case up so a second observer could act on it (weeks 5–6) → source and compare it against a wider corpus (weeks 7–9) → weigh it against a framework honestly, including where the framework doesn’t fit (weeks 10–11)
• the Final Capstone reframed as what the method was always for: not a new skill, a single design task that uses every prior one — a containment or warding protocol for a case nobody in this course has observed
• a handful of the idea seeds on offer, each one a design problem picked up from a specific gap already surfaced this semester: a handoff procedure for a case whose only failure mode is a lapse in observation; a containment question for an anomaly that spreads by being copied rather than by staying in one place; a protocol for acting safely on a case that doesn’t have one agreed account of itself. None is a template — picking one still means designing it, not filling in a form
• what the capstone actually asks you to trace: not “did you use material from every week,” but one specific piece of it — a classification category, a named countermeasure mechanism, a safety rule — that your protocol’s design decision would break without
• taking a stated position on the current leading framework from week 11, and saying plainly whether and how it shaped the protocol — an open position, stated rather than left as a hidden assumption

After this lecture#

The Final Capstone is due this week. There is no further submission after it — this practical is the last time the method gets reviewed before you’re asked to run the whole thing yourself, once, end to end.