The Verify Function

A single verify step decides whether a reproduction passed and whether a public deposit is clean of anything it must not contain.

One gate, machine-checked

Human judgment about whether a reproduction 'looks right' is exactly where wishful thinking enters. Kronos moves that judgment into code: a verify step that compares reproduced outputs to the deposited reference and returns pass or fail. It applies the two-tier standard — byte match where deterministic, tolerance match where numerical — so the result is defined rather than argued; see two-tier reproduction.

A second job: the firewall

The same verification discipline guards the boundary of what may be published. Before a public artifact ships, a verify pass confirms it is clean — that it carries the physics record and none of the material the firewall excludes, above all economics. A public technical build that must contain no cost figures is checked by a verifier that reports clean before release. See what we don't publish.

What a verify run reports

• Reproduction status: which outputs matched at Tier 1, which matched within tolerance at Tier 2, and which failed.
• Cleanliness status: whether any excluded content — economics, confidential material — was detected in a public artifact.
• A single verdict: the artifact is released only when both come back clean.

Why encode it

A rule that lives only in a reviewer's head is a rule that eventually gets skipped under pressure. Encoding both the reproduction check and the firewall check means the standard is applied the same way every time and leaves a record. It is the enforcement layer beneath the open-science strategy.

We do not ship a public deposit until verify says both that it reproduces and that it is clean.