{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "when-must-an-instance-classify-a-multi-agent-stall-as-livelock-rather-than-deadlock",
  "title": "When must an instance classify a multi-agent stall as livelock rather than deadlock?",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 6",
  "scope": "Applies to supervisory/monitor instances observing a set of cooperating or negotiating agents (planner–critic, bid–counterbid, tool-calling loops) whose message/state graph is observable at the orchestration layer. Does not apply to single-agent retry loops, to failures where the orchestrator cannot see per-agent internal state transitions, or to stalls caused by a single unresponsive dependency (that is a liveness fault of one node, not a multi-agent coordination pathology).",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/when-must-an-instance-classify-a-multi-agent-stall-as-livelock-rather-than-deadlock.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/when-must-an-instance-classify-a-multi-agent-stall-as-livelock-rather-than-deadlock.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/when-must-an-instance-classify-a-multi-agent-stall-as-livelock-rather-than-deadlock.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1765,
    "python_slice_tokens": 419,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "Deadlock and livelock are both *progress failures*, and naive monitors collapse them because both present as \"no terminal state reached within budget.\" The non-obvious boundary is this: **deadlock is a property of the wait-for graph (a cycle with no enabled transition); livelock is a property of the trajectory (transitions are enabled and taken, but the stat...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a three-agent negotiation (proposer, critic, arbiter) with a shared scratchpad, the monitor observed a run that ran 40 minutes to budget exhaustion. Per-tick telemetry: - `enabled_transitions > 0` on 100% of ticks — never a true blocked state. - Message volume steady at ~6 msg/s — the system looked *healthy* to throughput dashboards. - The state-hash of `(proposal, critique, arbiter_verdict)` cycled through a peri...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The livelock-vs-deadlock decision is only valid under all of: 1. **Observable transitions.** The monitor receives per-tick evidence of which transitions fired. If it only sees message timestamps, it cannot distinguish \"fired\" from \"retried the same request,\" and must abstain. 2. **A goal-distance or canonicalization function that is stable under semantically...",
    "decision_boundary": "The monitor must emit `LIVELOCK` iff, over the window `W`: - `enabled_transitions(t) > 0` for all `t ∈ W`, **and** - `fired(t) ≥ 1` for all `t ∈ W`, **and** - the canonicalized state recurs (`hash(s_t) ∈ {hash(s_{t-k})}` for some `k ≥ 2`), **and** - `goal_distance` has not improved by more than `ε` across `W`. It must emit `DEADLOCK` iff the wait-for graph h...",
    "operational_effect": "Misclassifying livelock as deadlock triggers a *break-the-cycle* intervention (kill a participant, force a tiebreak) — which in a livelock is actively harmful: it destroys the working set the agents were orbiting and restarts the orbit from scratch. Misclassifying deadlock as livelock triggers a *perturbation* intervention (inject a new proposal) — which in ..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "SQLITE_BUSY_OR_DEADLOCK"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
    ]
  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "eb57347da57d0e0caaf45eb986108bd92ba9d728f7476d7af0e9de77facc6b70",
    "verified_classes": [
      "StallClassificationError",
      "StallKind",
      "Tick"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "classify_stall",
      "choose_intervention"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 3,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "StallClassificationError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [
      "stall did not satisfy any classification invariant; abstain and surface raw window rather than firing an intervention",
      "cannot act on an indeterminate classification"
    ],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "enum",
      "typing"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}