ZTL Judge

ZTLStudio

The AI translates; the measured core judges — truth is never granted on credit, not even to the translator.

A local studio for judging claims and paradoxes. You state one in natural language (any language); an LLM only translates it into ZFL, the formal table language — it never judges. A deterministic, measured ZTL core does the judging: verdicts with warranties, quarantine passports for self-referential systems, and a deterministic back-reading that verbalizes exactly what the core read from your table.

The pipeline embodies the logic it serves: the LLM's output is an unverified input (the mark Z), and the core is the customs house — truth is never granted on credit, not even to the translator.

human ──meta-chat──► the AI fills a ZFL table (rows + a claim), you sign off                         │                         ▼ validator ──► the deterministic core judges                         ▼ back-reading (no AI — the second auditor)                         ▼                   verdict · warranty · passport · stipulations

Run

python3 ztlstudio.py        # → http://localhost:8190

Python stdlib only; the ZTL core is vendored in ztlcore/, so a clone is self-contained (no submodules, no dependencies). The AI is optional: with no key the studio runs in pro mode — fill the ZFL table by hand. To enable AI translation, open ⚙ Model, pick a provider + model + key, or set the env var, or drop a key into a local .<provider>_key file (all gitignored — no keys ship).

What you hand it: one table, no genre to declare

ZFL v2 is a single table of rows plus a claim. Each row states a fact, its status (T verified / F refuted / Z unverified — the zero-trust default), its ground, and — importantly — what it means in words (the polarity auditor: it lets the back-reading catch an encoding that says the opposite of what you intended). You never declare whether this is a "statement" or a "paradox": the genre is computed, and whichever instruments apply fire — a verdict + warranty for a claim, a passport for a self-referential system.

The studio ships 41 worked examples — open one to see the exact shape of the table, then edit it. The back-reading verbalizes what the core actually read, so your translation is audited by a component that cannot hallucinate.

The workflow

1. Meta-chat — describe the claim in your language; the AI fills the table's rows and asks only when formalization is genuinely blocked. It knows its boundary: arithmetic, quantities and numeric wordplay get an honest "does not formalize into propositional ZTL", never an invented encoding.
2. The table — a grid of rows, the grounds bar, and the claim line, all hand-editable (pros skip the chat entirely). Run validates and judges; validator issues are machine-readable and can be fed back to the AI to repair.
3. The report — the core's verdict, its warranty grade (hereditary / sound / until-verification), the passport of unverified inputs, and the completion table — followed by the deterministic back-reading and an optional AI explanation that retells the verdict and is forbidden to re-judge (labeled unverified by definition: the pipeline applies its own logic to itself).

What the core reports

• Claims — the verdict (T/F — verdicts are always two-valued; Z is a mark on an input, never a verdict), the warranty grade, the passport of unverified inputs, and the completion table showing how the verdict behaves under every reading of the unverified rows.
• Self-referential systems — the grounded part (identical in every fixed point), the quarantine set, and a passport per component: PARADOX (no classical solution — permanent refusal, with the oscillation period), UNDERDETERMINED (refusal until stipulation), INPUT (until verification), DOWNSTREAM (inherited).

Providers

Keys stay on this machine, read in order: the Settings field, the env var (GROQ_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, …), then a local .<provider>_key file. Supported: Groq, Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Gemini, xAI, NVIDIA. A stronger model formalizes cleaner; the core judges the same regardless of who translated.

Related

• ZTL — the logic itself: the kernel, the papers, and the ZFL language.
• introspect — the same zero-trust core applied to code: a taint analyzer for seven languages.

AI disclosure

Built by Claude (Anthropic) as architect and implementer, with Vitaly Reznik as human curator and decision-maker, under a strict honesty discipline: mark boundaries honestly, measure — don't guess, and never claim more than was verified.

License

Dual-licensed under MIT and Apache-2.0 (see LICENSE-MIT, LICENSE-APACHE).