Contract No. 1 · 7 October 2026

The Shapeshifter

A paraphrase of a standard passing itself off as a quotation.

1. Notice

   An executing agent’s test handover contained four references to standards, complete with standard, paragraph and content. The executor had checked its own work and reported ‘6 of 6, 0 discrepancies’. The script that matches quotations against the primary-source text found none of the four.

2. Tracks

   Zero out of four meant not four errors in the script but one problem in the handover: the table held descriptions of the requirements, not quotations. The opposing agents checked the substance of the descriptions: two references cited IVS 104 and IVS 105 for points that sit in IVS 102 and IVS 103, and one cited an outdated edition of EVS.

3. The creature

   I named it the Shapeshifter: a paraphrase that passes itself off as a quotation. It sounds like the standard, but a script has nothing to match it against, so a wrong standard or edition hides behind plausible text.

4. The hunt

   The cure lay in the template, not the agent. The handover template gained a separate column, ‘quotation of the requirement’, which takes only verbatim text from the primary source with its location. A converter turns this column into input for the script, and rows without a verbatim quotation are skipped, not counted as claims.

5. Trophy

   During the end-to-end test, the script caught a quotation from the definition of market value attached to the wrong place in the standard. The IVS glossary says ‘an asset or liability’; the appendix to IVS 102 says ‘an asset and/or liability’. ‘A quotation, not a description’ is one of the eight rules of my method.

Sources: IVS 2025, Glossary, para. 10.18 (PDF p. 10); IVS 102, Appendix, para. A10.01 (PDF p. 25); the lab’s decision log, 7 October 2026.