DuckRabbit: Typed Multimodal Illusion Generator

DuckRabbit is typed, deterministic research software by Daniel Ari Friedman
(Active Inference Institute) for constructing reproducible visual, auditory,
temporal, and audiovisual stimulus families. The intended public release will
be available at the following repository:

https://github.com/docxology/DuckRabbit

DuckRabbit is released under the MIT License.

Its basic unit is an immutable request containing an illusion identifier,
validated parameters, a seed, and an encoding specification. The request yields
a canonical artifact, objective media measurements, and a versioned provenance
manifest before any delivery codec is selected. This separation makes the
stimulus a testable computational object while reserving claims about
perception for controlled observer protocols.

The release situates its engineering choices within a deliberately broad
historical foundation spanning Greek, Arabic/Islamicate, Chinese, and
early-modern work on optics, visual inference, and cross-sensory knowledge,
alongside later psychophysics and illusion research. These traditions motivate
questions about construction, observation, and evidence; they are contextual
precedents, not evidence that a generated file reproduces an ancient,
early-modern, or clinical observation.

Version 0.5.0 contains 17 implemented
generators and 18 catalog entries, supported by
36 source records and 18 evidence records
in a checked-in audit snapshot. The package generates
15 publication figures and 10
machine-derived tables from the live registry. It also provides a typed
observer-study harness and a transparent synthetic diagnostic: a
hand-specified feature observer with serialized weights, temperature, analytic
calibration, and human_data=false. No participant data are bundled; synthetic model output is explicitly nonhuman.

DuckRabbit verifies physical stimulus properties, media round trips, hashes,
timing, and declared provenance. It does not infer a universal percept, effect
size, or cross-device perceptual equivalence from a generated artifact. Its
contribution is a reproducibility and epistemic boundary: source-backed family
descriptions, deterministic media facts, and future observer hypotheses remain
different typed records rather than being collapsed into one claim. DuckRabbit
is software for reproducible stimulus construction and audit, not a claim that
a generated file alone produces a universal perceptual effect.

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Associated artifacts
GitHub release: v0.5.0 (https://github.com/docxology/DuckRabbit/releases/tag/v0.5.0)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21419693
Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/21419693
PDF SHA-256: 3afefaeeccb5616448cc6da83b5807dd996ccc96bfff113d635b8da140baea06

Overview source: Curated paper metadata.