Software for useful partial information.

Most software asks for more state: more sensors, more labels, more simulation fidelity, more privileged access. Sundog asks a narrower question. When direct inspection is blocked, expensive, delayed, or unrealistic, does the world still leak enough structure to act?

We build small, inspectable systems where the decisive state is hidden, the world still leaks structure, and action can be taken from the trace. Then we measure where that stops working.

Full state is often a fantasy. Real systems are occluded, noisy, delayed, expensive to instrument, or deliberately hidden. A useful system may not get to inspect the target, and sometimes it should not be given privileged state just to make the demo easy.

The target may be hidden, but the world responds. Light shifts. Torque changes. A field bends. A rig deforms. A player hesitates. A procedural system exposes just enough state to act without authorial omniscience.

We call that surrounding structure the halo: the signal around the signal. The lab's work is to make the halo inspectable.

Sundog began as a field alignment problem, not as an abstract theorem. The original procedure came from aligning acoustic ceiling anchors for suspended HVAC equipment above a quantum-computing environment.

A plumb laser, a fastener head, and an occluded line of sight forced a practical question: could alignment be confirmed through the loss and return of a signal, rather than by direct inspection of the seated fastener?

That origin keeps the lab grounded. Sundog is about work done under constraints: blocked sightlines, imperfect communication, physical tolerances, and the need to know when a procedure has actually landed.

Sundog workbenches and product systems follow a recurring pattern:

1. The decisive state is hidden.
2. The world leaks structure through an indirect signal.
3. That signal is compressed into a control-relevant form.
4. The system acts from the transformed signal.
5. The operating envelope and failure boundary are measured.

The important language is surfaces, not proofs. Each system shows where the idea can be made practical, but not every system carries the same evidence weight.

The current scientific claim is deliberately narrow: in a controlled MuJoCo mirror-alignment experiment, a controller with no Cartesian target access aligns from sparse photometric feedback and reaches terminal accuracy comparable to a target-aware analytic baseline.

The broader program is staged. Applications motivate new controlled studies. Controlled studies earn stronger language. Failures are part of the result.

We publish the repository, docs, workbenches, stress tests, and claim boundaries because the idea is only useful if it can survive inspection. We invite replication, formalization, application-specific benchmarks, hardware validation, and critical review.

Humility, for Sundog, is methodological. We do not assume full sight. We do not promote a broad theorem before the evidence earns it. We do not hide the boundary where the signal stops working.

• Sundog is not a port, fork, or p-system continuation of SunDog: Frozen Legacy. The Atari game and its preservation ecosystem are separate historical projects.
• Sundog is not a crypto project.
• Sundog is not a claim that indirect signals always beat direct state.
• Sundog is not a claim that agents should be denied information for aesthetic reasons.
• Sundog is not "better game AI" or deeper search. Game-facing workbenches matter only when they express hidden state, indirect signal, transformation, action, and failure boundary.
• Sundog is not a universal alignment proof. The broad theorem is a research program. The controlled evidence remains narrower.

A sundog is not the sun. It is a displaced bright spot produced by geometry.

That is the point. The useful signal is not always the source itself. Sometimes the system cannot inspect the target directly, but the surrounding geometry still reveals something actionable.

The name is not nostalgia and not mysticism. It is a reminder that indirect light can still be information.