Experience event
The atomic unit of cognition: a structured record binding an input, the internal state at the time, the action taken, the outcome, and an initial evaluation score. The evaluation score seeds the reinforcement pipeline. In code: ExperienceEvent.
The experience event is the fundamental data structure that every other mechanism in the Cognitive Substrate is built around. It is atomic in the sense that it captures one complete unit of experience: what came in (the input), what the system knew at that moment (the internal state snapshot), what it decided to do (the action), what actually happened (the outcome), and a first-pass quality score (the evaluation score). The evaluation score is critical: it is not the final reinforcement value - that comes later after the full reinforcement pipeline runs - but it seeds the pipeline with a signal that allows initial retrieval priority to be set immediately without waiting for consolidation. Experience events are immutable once written: the episodic truth layer holds them permanently, and downstream representations (semantic memories, reinforcement updates, abstraction clusters) are derived from them, not replacements for them. In the TypeScript implementation the type is ExperienceEvent; the schema has evolved across pipeline versions but backward compatibility is maintained through the Schema Registry.