
We present a recursive compression protocol (RCP) for learning a shared codec, and report empirical evidence for two distinct compression regimes in AI-to-AI symbolic communication. Eight automated experiments tested recursive compression across substrates (GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4) and conditions. The primary experiments identified a broadcast regime (Level 1, 2-5.5x compression, 6.8 cold-start fidelity on a 0-10 scale) and an ansible regime (Level 4+, 50-95x compression, 0.9 cold-start fidelity). Validation experiments established that the broadcast-ansible boundary is grammar-independent, the noise floor for random symbols is 0.8/10, semantic attractor basins are stable across runs while specific symbols are path-dependent, and a warm vs. cold fidelity comparison demonstrates a measurable private communication channel (7-point gap). A pre-registered human validation study (N=46, AsPredicted #271640) confirms the warm-cold fidelity gap: blind raters preferred warm expansions for emotional content (d=2.25, p=2.28e-19) with a domain-selective interaction (emotional gap 5.96 vs. factual gap 2.52, p=6.95e-10). The two-regime structure suggests recursive compression naturally produces communication channels with public (broadcast) and private (ansible) layers. Correction note (2026-02-04): The file originally uploaded with this record (RCP_Paper_Draft_v10.docx) contained an earlier manuscript version with incorrect numerical values and a different paper structure. It has been replaced with the corrected version (RCP_Paper_v11.docx). The corrected values: ansible-regime cold-start fidelity is 0.9/10 (was incorrectly reported as 0.7/10 in the original file), and Experiment 1 L4+ cold fidelity is 0.8/10 (was reported as 1.0/10). All claims in the current file have been verified against raw experimental data.
symbolic communication, AI communication, human validation, lossy compression, recursive compression
symbolic communication, AI communication, human validation, lossy compression, recursive compression
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