# Notes

This folder collects working notes for the project tentatively titled:

**Distributional Capacity Bounds for Feedback Alignment in Multilayer Perceptrons**

Use this directory as the project memory. Keep rough ideas here before promoting them into a paper draft or experiments.

## Start here (current state)

- [36_evidence_ledger.md](36_evidence_ledger.md): **the writing base** — full
  evidence chain, corrected headline numbers, figure sources, claim discipline.
- [38_mnist_real_data_validation.md](38_mnist_real_data_validation.md): e0
  theorem + estimator replicated on MNIST (no fit).
- [39_teacher_test_gap.md](39_teacher_test_gap.md): teacher-task test gap —
  optimization cost invariant, test effect task-dependent (sign flip).
- [37_wrapup_corrections.md](37_wrapup_corrections.md): pre-writing audit
  fixes (e0 sampler now real FA backward; closed-form comparison now
  data/init-matched — corr 0.977 retired, 0.933 matched / 0.982 ensemble).
- [35_current_results_consolidated.md](35_current_results_consolidated.md): contribution snapshot (numbers corrected per note 37).
- [34_closed_form_soft_ramp_theorem.md](34_closed_form_soft_ramp_theorem.md): closed-form gap law that quantifies the burden and explains the soft ramp.
- [18_contribution_roadmap.md](18_contribution_roadmap.md): contribution roadmap (includes the tangent-operator estimator).

## Files

- [00_project_overview.md](00_project_overview.md): high-level thesis, contribution map, and scope.
- [01_theory_notes.md](01_theory_notes.md): notation, theorem candidates, proof sketches, and open theoretical gaps.
- [02_experiment_notes.md](02_experiment_notes.md): validation plan, metrics, datasets, and plotting ideas.
- [03_paper_outline.md](03_paper_outline.md): draft paper structure and section-level writing plan.

## Note Conventions

- Prefer formulas and precise claims over prose-only ideas.
- Mark unproven statements as `Conjecture` or `Hypothesis`.
- Mark results ready for paper text as `Candidate theorem`, `Candidate proposition`, or `Candidate corollary`.
- Keep experiment ideas close to the metric they test.
- When a note depends on an assumption, write the assumption explicitly.