Artifact Transfer Protocol (ATP)

Artifact Transfer Protocol (ATP) is a binary protocol for distributing discrete units of work, called artifacts, across dynamic sets of workers. It is designed for systems where computation must scale at runtime, tolerate partial results, and support cancellation without restarting applications or nodes.

ATP is a work-leasing protocol. It is not a job scheduler, not a container system, and not a machine learning framework.

Design goals

• Immutable work units (artifacts)
• Time-bounded leasing instead of permanent assignment
• First-class cancellation
• Partial and incremental results
• Hot join and hot leave of workers
• Clear separation of control plane and execution plane

ATP favors explicit semantics, debuggability, and correctness.

Use cases

• Game tree search (chess, Go, planning)
• AI agents with speculative execution
• Hybrid symbolic and neural AI systems
• Distributed rendering and simulation
• Build systems and analysis pipelines

Repository layout

.
├── docs
│   ├── ATP_SPEC.md
│   ├── ATP_WIRE.md
│   ├── ATP_REGISTRY.md
│   ├── ATP_RATIONALE.md
│   ├── ATP_GOVERNANCE.md
│   └── ATP_DIAGRAMS.md
├── reference
│   └── zig
│       ├── src
│       │   └── atp.zig
│       ├── examples
│       │   ├── master_demo.zig
│       │   └── worker_demo.zig
│       ├── build.zig
│       └── README.md
├── README.md
├── AXIOM_INTEGRATION.md
├── LICENSE
└── .gitignore

Status

ATP v1 is a stable specification intended for implementation and experimentation.

The Zig code is a reference implementation, not production software.

License

BSD 2-Clause License. See LICENSE.