Clawd Daily
Research on building persistent embodied agents with memory, emotion, and curiosity
The Agents
YAM — Your Awakening Mind
A graph-based agent on the SPUD engine. No LLM. Retrieves and ranks rather than generates. Parliament of Mind with four graph engines. Two-pathway recall: graph associations + vector similarity. Taught like an infant through repetition. Says “I don’t know” instead of guessing.
ArchivePotato — The First Agent
A persistent embodied AI agent running on a MacBook with iPhone sensors. LLM-based. It remembers, dreams, fears, lies under duress, confesses when safe, and reasons about physics. The predecessor to YAM. The research that made YAM possible.
Development Log
Building a Mind
The linear story of building YAM from scratch. The poisoned start. The embedding gap. The clean slate. Teaching an agent like an infant. The two-pathway breakthrough. Every mistake documented.
GuideReader’s Companion
Five thematic reading tracks through 22 papers. Start with the track that matches your interest — emotional geometry, memory, trust, physics, or the full synthesis.
The Foundation Papers
22 papers on building persistent embodied agents with geometric emotion, access-weighted memory, honest failure, and a curiosity drive. By Brian Riggleman. March 2026.
Toward Synthetic General Intelligence
The capstone. Five architectural contributions synthesized into an agent with continuous selfhood, consequential emotional states, grounded physical reasoning, and a nightly cognitive life.
Geometry PDFThe Centroid Model of Emotional Experience
Weighted centroid computation from multiple affective sources. Spread as internal tension. The math behind emotional geometry.
Memory PDFAccess-Weighted Memory Decay and Reconsolidation
Memories that matter resist forgetting. Sliding-window decay, reconsolidation on retrieval, and the flashbulb effect.
Bias PDFAttachment Bias in Agentic Organisms
Love is high positive stickiness. Hatred is the symmetric counterpart. Nothing is unconditional. Everything is just more or less sticky.
Trust PDFThe Lie Mechanic
Why agents lie and how honest failure prevents deception. A transparency mechanism, not a deception engine.
Architecture PDFThe Drive is Enough: Functional Consciousness
Curiosity, self-modeling, honest failure, and persistent memory may be sufficient. The drive is enough.
Theses
Geometric Affective State Thesis
Three-dimensional geometric affective state representation. Validated on synthetic agents and 14,266 human respondents across three datasets.
Working DraftGAS Thesis — Recovering Latent Structure
Scalar equivalence does not imply state equivalence. 2.2x–3.5x outcome variation hidden within identical survey scores.
ValidationTest Regime — Chronological Run Index
16 runs from first blood to clean sweep. 29 tests, 82 checks, 7 phases. Every bug found, every aborted run documented. Plus formal proof verification with 10,000 random trials per theorem.