Coordination by Foreknowledge: Semantic Rendezvous Tokens, Time--Based Addressing, and Deterministic Peer Systems
Riaan de Beer
Abstract
The architectural pattern now called Predictive Rendezvous was originally introduced in ashort prior--art note under the title ``Predictive Rendezvous: Time--Intent--DeterministicPeer Coordination Without Infrastructure''. That document had two goals: to record an ideabefore it became folklore, and to fix some vocabulary around it. It did not attempt to be afull treatment. This book is an attempt to do that deeper work, under a different name so that the roles ofthe two texts remain distinct. The prior--art note marks the first appearance of the idea inpublic form. The present volume develops it as a broader architecture of coordination byforeknowledge. The organising claim is simple: in many settings, peers can coordinate by sharing enoughinformation about their future behaviour that continuous infrastructure is not required forcorrectness. Time, intent, and entropy become first--class protocol primitives, and SemanticRendezvous Tokens (SRTs) act as executable plans rather than as identifiers or locators. This book examines the consequences of that shift for networking, distributed systems,device association, cooperative computation, and autonomous agents. Throughout, a concreteimplementation serves as a case study, but the focus remains on the architectural layer andits design space, not on any single codebase. The style is intentionally architectural and conceptual. The aim is to describe structuresthat can be realised in multiple implementation languages and environments. Where possible,the text avoids examples that would quickly date it, in the hope that the underlying ideasremain readable as the surrounding ecosystem changes.