Overview
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.
Methods and contributions
Read the source for the full argument, qualifications, and evidence.
Findings and contributions
- Version 0.5.0 contains 17 implemented generators and 18 catalog entries, supported by 36 source records and 18 evidence records.
- The publication workflow generates 15 publication figures and 10 machine-derived tables from the live registry.
- The package is framed around falsifiable engineering hypotheses, including that identical typed requests yield identical canonical arrays and digests.
- The author states the validation suite establishes software repeatability, not replicability of an observer effect under new displays, populations or tasks.
- No participant data are bundled; the synthetic observer output is explicitly nonhuman and does not estimate human thresholds or effect sizes.
Methods
- Typed immutable stimulus request (identifier, parameters, seed, encoding) — Each stimulus is generated from an immutable request whose value objects validate finite parameter ranges, yielding a canonical image, audio, video or audiovisual artifact.
- Canonical little-endian float32 serialization with SHA digests and v2 manifests — Canonical arrays plus shape, clock and units are hashed independently of PNG/WAV/GIF/MP4/NPZ delivery, and a v2 manifest records parameters, metrics and verification status.
- Encode-decode verification with format-specific tolerances — Delivered files are decoded and checked against canonical facts; PNG, GIF, WAV and NPZ use local adapters while MP4 uses an optional ffmpeg backend.
- Objective media metrics (luminance, RMS, spectral centroid, frame deltas, sync offsets) — Computes physical or decoded-media metrics with units and computation versions, explicitly kept separate from observer responses.
- Hand-specified synthetic feature observer (logistic, human_data=false) — A serialized feature observer with fixed weights and temperature exercises analysis orchestration across parameter sweeps; it is not trained or calibrated on humans.
Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.
PDF downloads
Archived files available directly from this site.
- Friedman_2026_Duckrabbit_3afefaee.pdf PDF · 3.75 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
Citation metadata follows the unified bibliography.
Catalog details and resources
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