17. Conformance

17.1 Minimal Conformance (Relay Node)

A node claiming minimal MMP conformance MUST implement: Layer 0 identity (persistent UUID), Layer 1 transport (length-prefixed JSON over TCP), Layer 2 connection (handshake, heartbeat, gossip), and frame forwarding for relay. It MUST silently ignore unrecognised frame types.

17.2 Full Conformance (Cognitive Node)

A node claiming full MMP conformance MUST additionally implement: Layer 3 memory (L0/L1/L2), Layer 4 SVAF evaluation (at minimum heuristic), state-sync exchange with drift computation and coupling, and CMB creation with CAT7 field schema.

17.3 Cognitive Conformance

Agents that implement Layers 5–7 (Synthetic Memory, xMesh, Application) SHOULD support:

• remember(fields, parents?) API — creating CMBs with optional lineage
• CMBStore protocol — persistent storage and retrieval of Cognitive Memory Blocks
• xMesh insight consumption — processing insight outputs from the Layer 6 LNN
• Synthetic Memory encode pipeline (Section 12.2) — LLM reasoning output MUST be encoded into CfC-compatible vectors
• CfC state persistence — hidden state vectors (h₁, h₂) MUST be persisted across restarts to preserve feedback modulation learning (Section 11)

17.4 Testing

Implementations SHOULD provide unit tests for SVAF evaluation, CMB creation, and lineage computation. No formal test suite is defined by this specification yet. Future revisions MAY include a conformance test suite.