Rozmru

Rozmru is a fictional concept used in speculative discussions of information flow in networked systems. It denotes a unitless metric intended to quantify how much of a message's semantic content is preserved as it spreads through a system of agents or nodes.

A Rozmru score is defined on a scale from 0 to 1. A score of 1 represents perfect semantic preservation along a propagation path; 0 represents complete loss of meaning. In practice, it can be computed as the average semantic similarity between the original message representation and the representations observed at target nodes, optionally weighted by path length to reflect transmission cost or delay.

Calculation and variants of Rozmru may use different formulations. Common approaches include cosine similarity of embedding vectors, topic-model coherence, or human-annotated similarity measures. Some models normalize by path length, or take the minimum across possible paths to reflect worst-case fidelity. In others, Rozmru may be defined for entire broadcasts rather than single messages, producing a distribution of scores across recipients.

Applications and interpretation of Rozmru appear mainly in theoretical models and teaching to compare methods of message encoding, redundancy, and error correction in decentralized networks, peer-to-peer systems, or conversational AI simulations. It serves to illustrate the trade-off between broad reach and faithful meaning retention, and to compare different propagation strategies or encoding schemes in a simplified framework.

Etymology: The name Rozmru is a neologism created for this article, loosely combining elements from Slavic roots suggesting across or repeated and a placeholder meaning-retention concept. Related topics include information fidelity, semantic similarity, and network propagation models.