CCES is a read-only diagnostic standard that detects long-horizon structural brittleness in complex systems that performance metrics miss.
Designed for auditors, governance bodies, insurers, and regulators evaluating complex adaptive systems.
Why Performance Metrics Fail
Traditional performance metrics measure surface behavior: reward accumulation, task completion, constraint satisfaction. These metrics can remain stable even as a system develops hidden structural fragility.
A system can appear to perform well while simultaneously losing recoverability, exhausting adaptive capacity, and accumulating brittle dependencies. This divergence—stable reward coupled with structural brittleness—is invisible to conventional monitoring.
CCES detects this divergence by observing domain-native signals that reveal long-horizon structural risk before failure occurs.
What CCES Measures
Recoverability Assessment Protocol (RAP)
Observes how a system responds to perturbations. Measures whether the system can return to stable operation after disruption, or whether it exhibits cascading failure modes.
Long-Horizon Structural Indicator (LHSI)
Detects capacity exhaustion and loss of adaptive margin. Identifies systems approaching the boundary of stable operation.
Read-Only Guarantee
CCES operates as a pure diagnostic overlay. It:
- Does not modify training, rewards, policies, or observations
- Ingests logs and evaluation runs only
- Produces risk reports without runtime control
- Never touches system internals
Empirically Validated
CCES has been tested across multiple benchmarks and system types:
Internal CCES Simulations (v12+)
Controlled environments demonstrating RAP and LHSI detection across varying system architectures.
Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (RAP-only)
Validated recoverability assessment in multi-agent systems with emergent cooperation and defection patterns.
Constrained RL (CartPole-style)
Reinforcement learning environments with hard constraints, demonstrating capacity exhaustion detection.
Pendulum External Benchmark
Third-party validation on classical control systems with known failure modes.
Safety Gym External Benchmark
Ongoing validation on Safety Gym environments. Results pending publication.
See Benchmarks for detailed results and methodology.
Request Pilot Evaluation
If you are an auditor, governance body, insurer, or regulator interested in evaluating CCES for your organization, please provide your contact information and we will arrange a pilot assessment.