Recursive DeepMuse Improvement

Flo graph of the DeepMuse ontology

Introduction

In the next few months, I plan to start a tiny experiment around recursive self improvement. Tiny in that I'm applying RSI to a toy, called DeepMuse. DeepMuse started out as a visual music synthesizer called Sky, which I would perform as a VJ 20+ years ago*.

Underneath was a data flow script, call Flo, which I kept rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting. It was inspired by my days playing with an analog music synthesizer*. And then designing a project management system with Petri nets. Around that time, was a project at MIT around a Cellular Automata Machine*. And then there was Max*, a node based patcher for musical instruments. They all fostered a mindset, that information is flow.

A few years ago, I attended a workshop at NASA called: "The Virtual Iron Bird"*, which introduced the concept of using an Ontology to wrap the mission critical data flow around a space craft. So, I rewrote Flo again. But not for spacecraft; for visual music.

The goal was to make creating an ontology as fun as patching a modular synthesizer. Where you could plug, play, and experiment. The nice thing about an ontology for a toy is that, in contrast to a space craft, if you get it wrong, nobody dies. Instead, you get something interesting to iterate on. And because it is a toy, the ontology should be something a 12-year-old could understand.

I introduced this idea at a SuperHappyDevHouse* gathering, hosted ironically by Palantir. Ironically, in that I didn't know who Palantir was. It turns that Palantir was also working on ontologies. The kind where people could in fact die. To each their own, I suppose

What I hope to learn from making a Toy RSI is how to create a dialog with a Superintelligence. Not by a specialist; but by anyone, from age 12 on up.

So, here's the prompt I made to OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, and Google, with a follow-up asking Why:

Prompt

I want to implement recursive self improvement (RSI) on decomposing source code into a small flo ontology, called MuFlo. The tools I want to use are: Apple Studio M5 Ultra 512 GB, open weight models to decompose DeepMuse project, close source models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, to debate best implementations. See https://github.com/musesum/DeepMuse for toy application and package references to MuFlo.

Summarize Why

Claude Code Fable 5.1

Why, in short:

  1. Leverage. A 40-line grammar that describes the whole instrument is worth more than 40,000 lines of Swift that implement it. Everything that reads flo — a menu, a peer, a tape, a model — gets the entire system for free.
  2. Truth in one place. Right now behavior is split: some of it is declared in flo, some of it is buried in @Published vars and hard-coded shader calls. Two sources of truth means every edit is a reconciliation. One source means an edit is just an edit.
  3. Models can only work on what fits in their head. DeepMuse as Swift doesn't fit. DeepMuse as flo does. That's the difference between a model that can patch a bug and a model that can propose a new instrument.
  4. The loop pays for itself. Every accepted fragment is a training example for the next one, so the cost of extraction falls as the corpus grows — and the same gate that verifies a translation can verify an invention. You build the checker once.
  5. It's the thing you've been building toward for thirty years. Tr3, Flo, the code leaf, pipeline.future.flo.h — every step moved more of the instrument out of code and into the graph. This is that step, with the extraction automated.

ChatGPT Sol 5.6

Do RSI on DeepMuse because it is a real, complex, evolving codebase that can serve as both training material and a hard test for MuFlo.

The purpose is to see whether repeated AI-driven decomposition can:

  • compress DeepMuse into a much smaller MuFlo ontology,
  • preserve behavior while removing language/framework-specific structure,
  • expose reusable semantic primitives across UI, audio, vision, networking, Metal, and device interaction,
  • regenerate or refactor implementations from the ontology,
  • identify where the ontology is redundant or incomplete,
  • recursively improve the ontology based on those failures.

So DeepMuse is not the end product. It is the experimental substrate for discovering whether MuFlo can become a smaller, more general executable representation of software.

Grok 4.6

Why: a synth with thousands of parameters is useless if only the author can play it.
Digital audio copied analog patching and then broke it. MIDI is 0–127, a screen is 1920×1280, an accelerometer is ±3g. Without auto-remap, every cable is a unit conversion. Without a loop-break (Visitor / GABA), a live graph eats itself. Without twins, two devices are two programs.

MuFlo is the why of size. Nine primitives, not a tenth. If it cannot be said with Node, Tree, Graph, Plugin, Value, Wildcard, Twin, Closure, Visitor, it is not decomposed yet. A 12-year-old never sees that — they see things, pipes, knobs. “Connect my thumb to brush size.”

The Swift/Metal grew anyway. RSI is the why of keeping the ontology: rewrite source until the graph is smaller than the code and still plays. Open weights on the Studio own the tree so DeepMuse never leaves the box. Closed models only argue. The chair merges.
Playable, local, small. That is the whole why.

Google Gemini 3.1 Pro Extended

ARCHITECTURAL DRIVERS: DEEPMUSE TO MUFLO DECOMPOSITION

  • State Determinism: Migrating to the MuFlo functional dataflow graph forces strict execution purity. This eliminates implicit state mutations and race conditions across complex media synchronizations, including concurrent operations bridging native iOS and external Web APIs.
  • Ontological Minimization: Reducing the codebase to a constrained node ontology simplifies the execution graph. This minimizes computational overhead for real-time processing and standardizes the routing architecture for high-frequency state updates.
  • Automated Validation: Manual architectural translation is inefficient and prone to structural drift. RSI utilizes xcodebuild as a deterministic fitness function, forcing generation to converge on mathematically verifiable compilation states without manual intervention.
  • Hallucination Suppression: Single-model generation produces high error rates in specialized frameworks (Metal, Swift 6 concurrency). The API consensus network cross-validates domain-specific constraints—memory safety, logic reduction, and shader execution—prior to local synthesis by the M5 Ultra.