Medium Article: https://medium.com/@jsmith0475/we-solved-ais-reproducibility-crisis-by-treating-it-like-a-physics-problem-8936aed52923

The article "Cognitive Anchoring," by Dr. Jerry A. Smith, details a novel solution to the reproducibility crisis in large language models (LLMs) by treating the issue as a physics coordination problem. The core proposal, cognitive anchoring, uses principles from gauge theory to synchronize the attention heads within transformer models, which otherwise drift and produce inconsistent reasoning paths. The authors introduce four specific anchoring mechanisms—symbolic, temporal, spatial, and symmetry—to constrain representational degrees of freedom without sacrificing logical content, leading to a 38% improvement in symbolic consistency during complex tasks like discovering field equations. The framework is presented as a mechanistic alternative to prompt engineering and is demonstrated to generalize across scientific discovery and behavioral science applications, such as modeling complex cultural multipliers in athletic valuation. Ultimately, the paper establishes anchoring as a foundational protocol for achieving stable and reliable inference in AI reasoning systems.