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№ 10 · Lineage · 2026-07-31

Twenty authors, one machine.

MIZAN built the bolt. The people on this page built everything the bolt holds together. This is the complete citation ledger of the engine — what each framework says, and exactly what the circuit enforces from it.

Every verification standard is a claim about whose mathematics you are standing on. Ours should be checkable like everything else we publish. Below is the full lineage of the MIZAN engine — two statistical literatures and one cryptographic one — with exact citations and, for each, the specific thing the machine enforces. Where enforcement is partial or verifier-side rather than in-circuit, that is stated, because the boundary is the product.

The rule this page runs on

Attribution, not endorsement. None of the authors named here has reviewed, approved, or endorsed MIZAN, and nothing on this page should be read as implying otherwise. The citations run in one direction: we implement their published work, and we take responsibility for the implementation.

§01
The measure itself

The measure itself.

William F. Sharpe — the ratio everything else corrects
In the machine — the base statistic every credential commits, computed net of the committed, disclosed costs, at a calendar-honest periods-per-year (the annualization itself is checked; inflating it was the first bug our own verifier caught in production).
§02
The deflation program

The deflation program — Bailey & López de Prado.

The first school asks: given how the result was found, how much of it is luck?

Probabilistic Sharpe Ratio (PSR)
In the machine — recomputed inside the proof since era v11; the flagship credential reads PSR 0.7226 against the 0.95 bar and is published as NOT significant.
Deflated Sharpe Ratio (DSR)
In the machine — recomputed in-circuit since era v10, with the correction's key input — the number of trials — bound as the leaf count of a committed Merkle tree rather than self-reported. That binding is MIZAN's contribution; the correction is theirs. Our own flagship reads DSR 0.6779: not significant, published as-is.
Probability of Backtest Overfitting (PBO / CSCV)
Bailey, D.H., Borwein, J.M., López de Prado, M. & Zhu, Q.J., "The Probability of Backtest Overfitting," Journal of Computational Finance 20:4 (2017).
In the machine — combinatorially symmetric cross-validation enforced in-circuit: S=16 blocks, all C(16,8)=12,870 splits enumerated, no sampling. Flagship reads PBO 0.0759.
Combinatorial Purged Cross-Validation (CPCV)
In the machine — purged, embargoed combinatorial paths proven in-circuit; the flagship's 5th-percentile path Sharpe is +0.003, and the credential says so.
§03
The multiple-testing program

The multiple-testing program — White, Hansen, Harvey & Liu.

The second school asks: out of everything that was tried, does the best survivor mean anything at all?

The Reality Check
In the machine — the intellectual foundation of the v11 multiple-testing suite: the null that the best model has no predictive superiority over the benchmark, tested across the full committed set, not the published survivor.
Superior Predictive Ability (SPA)
In the machine — Hansen's studentized, less-conservative refinement of the Reality Check, enforced in-circuit since era v11 over the committed trial set.
The haircut, and the minimum backtest length
In the machine — the multiple-testing haircut logic informs the v11 gate family; MinBTL (minimum backtest length for the number of trials) is consistency-checked verifier-side, not yet fully in-circuit — an honest boundary we state everywhere the claim appears.
The garden of forking paths
In the machine — the diagnosis the committed trial ledger answers: even an honest researcher cannot count their own forks after the fact, so the ledger forces the count to exist before evaluation. The trial you didn't commit is a trial the credential doesn't cover — stated as a boundary, not hidden.
§04
The cryptography

The cryptography — proof instead of trust.

The third literature had the enforcement mechanism the first two lacked.

Zero-knowledge proofs
In the machine — the founding idea: prove a statement true while revealing nothing else. Here: the statistics are real; the strategy stays sealed.
Merkle commitments
In the machine — twice, load-bearing both times: the price data is pinned to a Merkle root the proof must match, and the trial set is a Merkle tree whose leaf count IS the trial count. The tree is why N cannot be understated.
STARKs — scalable, transparent proofs
In the machine — the proof system class every credential is minted in: no trusted setup, transparent, post-quantum-resistant. A 225 KB credential verifying in ~81 ms exists because of this line of work.
§05
Engineering acknowledgment

The engineering debt.

The RISC Zero zkVM
RISC Zero — the general-purpose zero-knowledge virtual machine the MIZAN guest program runs inside.
In the machine — every credential is a receipt from this zkVM: the era's guest image id names the exact program, and the STARK receipt is what the verifier checks first. This is an engineering debt we acknowledge to its builders — distinct from the scholarly lineage above, and listed apart from it on purpose: it is infrastructure we build on, not a framework the circuit enforces.
§06
The roster

Count them.

The honors this lineage carries, for the record: a Nobel Memorial Prize (Sharpe, 1990); two Turing Awards (Goldwasser and Micali, 2012 — for the zero-knowledge paper itself); the first Gödel Prize ever awarded (Goldwasser, Micali & Rackoff, 1993); an American Finance Association presidency (Harvey); and an election to the Royal Academy (López de Prado, 2026). We did not choose famous foundations — we chose the correct ones, and the field had already crowned them.

Count them: Sharpe; Bailey, Borwein, López de Prado, and Q.J. Zhu; White, Hansen, Harvey, Liu, and H. Zhu — two different Zhus, four years apart, both load-bearing; Gelman and Loken; Goldwasser, Micali, and Rackoff; Merkle; Ben-Sasson, Bentov, Horesh, and Riabzev. Twenty authors.

Two literatures, on the same campuses, across the same decades, that never met in a single system. MIZAN is the bolt between them.

What is ours, stated once and hedged: the committed trial ledger that turns N from a self-reported input into a structural property of the proof; era law, so a credential names its judge forever; and the practice of publishing our own refusals — including the flagship failure above — on the same wall as the passes. To our knowledge, no other production system enforces both statistical schools inside a zero-knowledge proof. That claim is falsifiable, and this page is part of how you'd falsify it.

Correction policy: if any citation above is imprecise, tell us and we will fix it publicly — the same rule we apply to our own numbers. [email protected]

ENGINE v11 · 3ac3b10b… ● LIVE REGISTRY 77 CREDENTIALS · APPEND-ONLY VERIFY ~81 MS · OFFLINE · TRUSTING NO ONE ANCHOR BITCOIN #962,013 SPEC VTR-1 · FROZEN · CC BY ROOT 88298a2e…c6825a · MERKLE-COMMITTED